Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver)

To start, I own a lot of Acer products. Every year or so, I tend to inch along in my needs and feelings for laptops. Prior to purchasing this, I had an 10" Acer Aspire One netbook which I was thrilled about and a 14" Acer Aspire Timeline. I was hoping that this machine would sort of be the bridge between the things that I really liked about a Netbook (light, good battery life, very portable, and low heat) and the performance of my more beefy laptop (higher resolution, better video performance, etc).

I have to say that in many ways this meets my needs and in some others it didn't quite live up to my expectations. To start with, though, I will first say that I am pleased with this notebook, overall. I am not going to blame the product for having Windows 8 which is at times obnoxious and counter-intuitive because the product description clearly says it comes with windows 8. Some people are not going to like it though. I'd suggest you try to navigate around Windows 8 sometime with a mouse in a store if you want a feel for the experience. Everyone's going to differ on whether they think this is one step forward and two back, or the other way around. What I will say is, for what Windows 8 is, this thing flies through it and it displays everything in a slick manner.

This has had no problems running Netflix, not that you would expect it to. It can do all your normal computing, and the easy app stuff they seem to be trying to turn windows into. On top of that, this isn't a great system to play games on, but it can run the games that I have played with respectable stability. I routinely play World of Tanks on mine with middle-of-the-road type graphics, and I'm very satisfied with the mid-20's to mid-30's frames per second. If you pump it as high as it goes (or as high as it lets you) you will see the frame rate drop though to a humanly noticeable level. The same can be said for Skyrim.

Some of the things that aren't measured in the specs that you might want to be aware of. This can get rather hot. If you are doing anything complicated, this could be come a 'not-on-my-lap laptop.' If you're just playing with the internet, it usually seems to be fine. If, like I mentioned above, you're playing a game, definitely set it down somewhere else. Also, this is the first Acer that I've purchased where the sound that comes with the computer is noticeably bad. The speakers that are in this sound tinny and hollow. If you are planning on playing music, this would probably force you to headphones or a separate speaker system. I carry around an 'X-Mini II Capsule Speaker,' which is quite nice for what it is, so I can plug that in if I need pretty or more noises for whatever reason.

I needed to replace my work notebook; I had previously purchased an Acer Timeline X series in the same 11.6" form factor and it has done fairly well throughout its two-year run with me around the world (literally) other than a few niggling problems.

I had a budget of about $1,500, so I was considering the Asus Zenbook Prime in the same form factor, but I couldn't find one with the 256GB SSD. Moreover, it didn't have a full-sized SD card slot and didn't come with the old-school VGA port (this was important because many of the customers I visit do not have projectors with HDMI inputs). I finally decided that for the price, I would buy the Acer V5 because it had the same processor (Ivy bridge Core i7) and double the RAM of the Asus (8GB vs. 4GB).

It seems that the minor problems with the last notebook have been addressed and it is exceedingly fast. The only complaint is that I'm still adapting to the touchpad with integrated buttons as my last one had dedicated buttons. However, with the money I saved, I decided to buy a 256GB SSD for the computer (be sure to get one that is 7mm high most of them are 9mm and will not fit inside the chassis) and used Acronis True Image to clone the drive...wow. Screaming fast performance that takes about 15 seconds to go from completely powered off to booted and about 4 seconds to go from sleep to booted. Apps open almost instantaneously...and I still have about $500 left in the budget to buy more stuff!

A quick word to those of you that put an SSD in the device using Acronis: I used a USB enclosure to turn the SSD drive into a flash drive in order to do the cloning. I spent a couple of hours trying to clone and the only way it worked for me was when I created a bootable flash drive with Acronis and then changed the BIOS's settings from UEFI to LegacyBoot (otherwise the BIOS won't let you boot to Acronis' Linux image). The cloning takes about an hour and then you can swap the HDD and SSD. Once you swap the drives, you need to change the BIOS back to UEFI or it won't boot Windows 8. Good luck!

Buy Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver) Now

No question...great performance. The VGA and HDMI ports support two monitors very well on this and all the other notebooks. The NEW Acer site allows a very smooth compare of the complex mix of features. Fortunately Amazon has the right stock.

Read Best Reviews of Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver) Here

Just got the machine on clearence. It seems like a nice machine. The mouse pad is a bit unresponsive. I had to turn the touch pad sensitivity up to full to get reasonable performance.

Windows 8: Wow, what an impressively hard to use operating system. I really hate Windows 8. As an engineer, I really did not think it would be that bad moving to Windows 8, that it would just take some getting used to. I am considering dropping back to W7 until the new W8 comes out that includes changes due to "user feedback". I hope they do that big time or its time to switch to MAC or Unix. It would be really nice if w8 came with a built in w7 fallback option.

I went to upgrade the hardrive and could not find how to get to the hard drive/memory. The bottom of the machine has a single, very large flat panel. All I had to do was to remove the one visiable screw near the front center and slide the panel off to the front. Very nice! Remove the battery before doing this just to be safe.

I found I could not upgrade the hard drive on this machine. A normal laptop drive is ~9.5mm thick. Some of the older drives are 12mm thick. I got a new 9.5mm 1TB drive (which is thin for a 1 TB drive) and found that it was too thick for the panel to fit properly back on the machine. It turns out that the WD 500 GB drive used in this machine (WD5000LPVX)is abnormally thin (6.5mm?), most likely specifically designed for thin ultrabook type laptops. Higher capacity drives just will not fit at this point in time. All I can say is that if you want to upgrade to an SSD, check the thickness first.

The battery uses an odd "slide lock" near the back. It was not clear to me that this was a slide and that it was for the battery.

Dan

Want Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver) Discount?

My V5-171-9661 would have been a great laptop, had it not suffered from the two following major issues:

1) It delivers only SATA2 (3Gb/s max) speed with Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD (~250MB/s reads). The laptop has the latest BIOS v2.15 in AHCI mode and the latest Intel Rapid Storage drivers. Both Intel RST tool and Samsung SSD Magician tool report SATA2, while the laptop's HM77 chipset is known to be SATA3-capable (6Gb/s). The same Samsung SSD used to deliver ~520MB/s with my old Lenovo SATA3-capable system. Now I'm not sure if it's only this specific machine, or the whole line of V5-171-9661 is affected. I'd appreciate if someone with the same model + SATA3 SSD could post his/her results.

2) The laptop came with Absolute Software Computrace/LoJack feature pre-activated. The BIOS doesn't have any settings to turn it off or even see check its status at all. It survives the hard drive swap, complete OS reinstall and keeps creating a set of executable files (rpcnet*.exe, rpcnet*.dll) in system folders. Basically, it is a kind of controversial BIOS rootkit, which seamlessly reports your laptop location (along with other demographics) to Absolute's servers. I have no plans to subscribe to Absolute's services and I don't want my laptop to call any 3rd party without my explicit consent. So far I've been unable to find a way to disable or kill Computrace. I contacted both Acer and Absolute and I am still waiting to hear from them. However, from what I googled on that matter, the chances to get rid of this "feature" appear to be less than zero. Again, my old Lenovo also had this feature in BIOS, but it arrived in inactive state, and I was able to disable it permanently in BIOS.

Two stars taken off.

Save 8% Off