acerAspire 5 Slim Laptop, 15.6 inches Full HD IPS Display, AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, Vega 3 Graphics, 4GB DDR4, 128GB SSD, Backlit Keyboard, Windows 10 in S Mode, A515-43-R19L, Silver

This thing has been great, heavy, but affordable with backlit keyboard - bought in 2020 and still using a little bit in 2025. I did need to buy a mouse because the touchpad was requiring overly deliberate presses. Right click was always a hassle as well. Speakers started mediocre and I think one got blown because now it's barely audible without headphones. I went on to higher priced acers (spin - very bad, and swift, nice but lousy charge port), now trying a gaming acer nitro. They are low priced, high value, but they do seem to break down over time. I started my computer journey with emachines (LOL) so I have always preferred low cost budget machines and get 2 years ago's cutting edge rather than always paying for the latest greatest or "getting more than I need to be future proof." After being disappointed with Acer's higher line, I have looked at a newer acer aspire, but my biggest issue with my swift seems to have migrated to aspire - a super skinny charging plug which bends, and has made the port on my newer computer barely workable for charging. I am writing this out of nostalgia because you probably won't buy this in 2025. Oh yeah, I put linux mint on it, took some getting used to and occasional googling foss help but no regrets.

I bought this laptop as a replacement for my old Toshiba laptop from 2012. The Toshiba one was starting to show its age by failing to pass POST and thus failing to boot. I had used it almost every single day since 2012 after all, as it was my college laptop and even helped me launch my career as an engineer, so it has served me well. But the OS failures were getting troublesome. They were happening increasingly often, so I decided before all my data was lost (which wasn't really that much, since I keep all my actually important data on a home file server), I decided to shop around for a nice, reliable, not-too-cheap laptop I could use to replace it, and this is the one I chose to buy.For the non-Linux enthusiasts, feel free to skip this paragraph, but a kernel panic is basically the Windows blue screen of death equivalent on Linux. My old Toshiba was having kernel panics all the time starting with Kernel 5, so I thought maybe it was my old hardware which has having trouble with the brand new kernel. I tried an LTS version of Kernel 4.19, thinking it was going to solve my kernel panic issue, but nope. I still had kernel panics all the time, and it was starting to get worrying how often it was happening (multiple times a day near the time I got this new Acer laptop). So I feel like I got the new Acer laptop just in time before the Toshiba hardware became unbootable. Now, I'm an electrical engineer, but I'm a lazy engineer. I didn't feel like dissecting the Toshiba to try and pinpoint what the problem might have been. I use Arch btw (best meme 2k19)So back to regular English. I'm thoroughly impressed with the hardware that AMD has developed with their Ryzen lineup and their Vega graphics. Sadly, with all the cryptocurrency mining happening nowadays, it's actually hard to find any AMD graphics card for use with actual graphics workloads like gaming. But that's beside the point. This Acer laptop, with its Ryzen 3 processor and built-in Vega Picasso graphics is almost overkill for what I use it for. I haven't tested any games on it, but I imagine it would run Minecraft well enough. Maybe not 60fps, but still enough to play. I use this laptop mainly for just web browsing, and occasional coding when I'm feeling ambitious with some sort of personal software project I want to work on.In the time that I used Windows 10 S Mode... it was just plain dumb. Not being able to install software from non-Microsoft sources? Really, Microsoft? What are you doing? You can easily opt out of the S Mode crap, but it warns you that you'll never be able to go back to S Mode in the future if you ever change your mind. Like that'll scare me into keeping S Mode! I'll show you how much I care about S Mode. I only spent about a half hour tinkering with it before I just blasted the whole NVMe M.2 drive clean and installed good old Arch Linux on it with a fully encrypted filesystem, so ain't nobody getting into my data. And I can say, this NVMe M.2 drive is freaking lightning quick. Compared to the old HDD on my Toshiba, this new laptop boots in like 15 seconds, if even that. My main PC with Godly specs (Intel i9-9900K + RTX2080Super + 1TB Samsung NVMe M.2) boots in around 10 seconds, so this little laptop is definitely keeping up with the speed.Overall, this Acer laptop is a fantastic computer; probably the best laptop I've ever owned at this price point. It's perfect for basic usage, and I recommend it to be used for light workloads like checking email, browsing social media, editing office documents, coding, and other basic tasks of the sort. The Ryzen + Vega chip will definitely last several years, and I'm happy to finally support a quality AMD product. Ultimately, it's up to you as the customer to decide if this is the right computer for your needs. Evaluate why you need this computer and determine whether or not the price of this laptop would best suit your needs. I needed something I could rely on with streaming, decoding, and rendering video data from YouTube, Twitch, and/or Netflix which is actually a bigger task than people give it credit for. If you don't intend to watch many videos or do anything more resource-intensive than that, then this laptop might be a touch too powerful for your needs. With all that in mind, it's safe for me to say that this Acer laptop is perfect for the moderately light workloads I intend to use it for.

I have owned uncountable computes since I bought my fist Apple "pizza box" desktop computer in 1993. In our household, we use computers for work, internet access, email, photo and word processing, and (particularly for me) musical notation and audio playback. No games, nothing requiring huge amounts of processing power. But still, this laptop is a quantum improvement over anything--desktop or laptop--I have ever used.I bought one of these for my wife when she retired and needed her own (rather than the office-provided) computer. I chose this Aspire mainly because it was cheap; but I have been impressed by its performance. So much so, in fact, that I bought another for myself.The first thing I noticed is how beautiful the display looks. I used to think my camera took crappy pictures. Now I know it takes great pictures--it just needs a good computer display to see them at their best.The second great thing is the speed with which this boots up. This laptop is ready to go in well under half a minute. And it loads and runs programs fast too.S-mode would never work for us: too many non-Microsoft proprietary programs that I need to mount--much of it open-source free-ware like Mozilla, Open Office, etc; but I also need many music creation and notation programs, like Finale and Band-In-A-Box However, it was quite easy to take the computer out of S-mode, and I don't know why some reviewers found that modification hard.I had to buy an external CD drive, as I still need that tech for several continuing projects. But that did not add much to the cost, and I think not having a CD drive on a laptop is pretty much the norm now, anyway.There is room for added RAM and a second internal hard drive--which I bought, but have not felt the need to install yet after 6 months of use.My wife's computer has worked flawlessly for the last 9 months. Bu mine has a couple of glitches, which made me reduce the rating from 5 to 4 stars.Periodically, I get an error message that my USB device (and what peripheral is not USB these days?) is not recognized. Since I have all my USB devices on a single outlet multiplier, I can simply switch to one of the other laptop ports (there are 3), and that solves the problem, for a while. When the message comes up again, I switch ports again. So far, so good...A second annoyance is that the audio output jack is iffy and needs wiggling from time to time to perform properly.I don't think any computer I have owned has lasted longer than 5 years or so--usually slowly degrading until finally needing professional restoration of my data. I suspect this Acer will last no longer and maybe not nearly as long. But at the price, we will be quite happy to get two or three years out of these machines.