Acer Aspire V5-571P-6473 15.6-Inch Touch Screen Laptop (Silky Silver)

It seems that laptop manufacturers think that a touchscreen is only useful in 13" and smaller machines. I do actual work on my laptop and need at least a 15" display. The Acer V5-571P was the only 15" touchscreen laptop I could find that is available today (Nov '12) and reasonably priced. I picked up the Core i5 model from the Microsoft store for $699 and upgraded the memory to 8GB RAM and replaced the slow 500GB HD with a 256GB Samsung SSD. The motherboard supports 6Gbs SATA, so I'm able to get the full read/write speeds from my SSD (400MBs write / 500MBs read). Replacing the RAM was simple because there's a panel held on by 2 screws. Replacing the hard drive is something that will give many people pause. Basically the entire laptop needs to be disassembled to get access to the HDD. It takes about 30 minutes of careful disassembly; luckily there is an Acer repair manual PDF available to show you how. Windows 8 boots pretty quickly from a normal HDD, but after installing the SSD, it now goes from completely powered off to the log in screen in 8 seconds. The touchscreen works as advertised and I have no complaints about it. The keyboard and trackpad are not so great. The trackpad is placed a little too far left so that my palm is constantly brushing it and causing unintended behavior. The backlit keys are a nice addition. The battery it ships with is a low capacity (14.8V 2350mAH). This is too small for a Core i5 laptop; With normal use I'm able to get 3.5 hours out of it. I think the battery life will be less with the original hard drive since the Samsung SSD is super low power. I have not been able to find a high capacity battery for this model. I would gladly carry some extra bulk to increase the battery life. If anyone finds a compatible battery of at least 4400mAH, please let me know.

Pros:

1) Touchscreen is fast and accurate; works as you would like

2) Price is fair for a 15" Core i5 dual core touchscreen laptop

3) Has enough ports to do what you need

4) Slim and relatively light for the power it packs

5) Includes a USB 3.0 port

6) Supports 6GBs SATA

7) Easy to upgrade the RAM

8) Supports dual monitor output (as most modern laptops do)

9) Power adapter is small and light

Cons:

1) Keyboard is a bit cheap some keys temporarily stick as you're typing

2) Touchpad works fine, but is a bit large so at times is accidentally touched

3) Battery life is not great (3.5 hours) and Acer doesn't offer a high capacity battery (yet?)

4) Build quality feels cheap and plasticky

5) The Ethernet+VGA dongle is less than ideal

6) If you're brave, it's worth replacing the HDD with an SSD.

7) The SD card slot is too shallow. You can't leave a card in the slot when you travel or it will be broken/lost because it sticks out too much.

8) Speaker sound quality is poor

9) Doesn't wake from sleep when you open the lid (can be either a Win8 bug or hardware issue)

Hardware wise, it's excellent and you're getting a lot of bang for your buck. Unfortunately, this laptop was plagued with wifi problems for the whole time I owned it. It would not maintain a wifi connection for more than 20 minutes before completely crapping out and giving me the "limited access" message.

Doing a google search for Acer Aspire A5 wifi showed me a TON of users who were having the same issues and there wasn't a fix available.

Buy Acer Aspire V5-571P-6473 15.6-Inch Touch Screen Laptop (Silky Silver) Now

get this Acer Aspire V5-571P for my kid(in university). the windows 8 is fun to play with touchscreen. the same cost you may select between i5 CPU with touchscreen or i7 CPU with old standard screen. I think you can not feel much of the speed different between i5 and i7. but you and your friend will know the different right away when you play on the touchscreen. By the way, the win8 pre-loaded a VPN, you cannot use school download win7 VPN, but you can config the WIN8 pre-load VPN for your school or company network. My kid said WIN8 (with touchscreen) work for ALL the university APPS as well as MS office 2010.

Read Best Reviews of Acer Aspire V5-571P-6473 15.6-Inch Touch Screen Laptop (Silky Silver) Here

I have to echo a previous review which starts by saying: "Hardware wise, it's excellent and you're getting a lot of bang for your buck. Unfortunately, this laptop was plagued with wifi problems for the whole time I owned it. It would not maintain a wifi connection for more than 20 minutes before completely crapping out and giving me the "limited access" message." ...

Unfortunately, fresh out of the box I am having the same WIFI problem. A forum mentioned a new driver coming out to fix this, but when I tried to update the driver, it said you already have the latest version. So I would say stay away from this product unless you can live with using a hard wire Ethernet connection.

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I've been searching for a laptop for 8 months. This is the best value money can buy. I've been in the IT industry for 15 years and I know value/quality. No need to look further for an incredible laptop at a great price. I have no interest in this brand name, I just know value/quality when I see it.

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