This is my favorite budget laptop. great price on Amazon. I like it because not only is it fast but you can add a second hard drive. In the following article I will walk you through the upgrade.
Starting at $400 with an Intel processor or $350 with an AMD chip, the 15.6-inch Aspire 5 is only 3.8 pounds (1.7 kg) and 0.7 inch thick (18 mm). That combination of size, weight and price, isn’t easy to find with a 15.6-inch display. By comparison, the Acer E 15 had the same screen size, but was more than 5 pounds (2.4 kg) and just over an inch thick (30 mm). It also started at roughly the same price and was similarly configured. You do lose things like an SD card reader, a VGA display output and a DVD drive, but chances are it’s only the card reader that matters to more people at this point, if anything.
The $530 configuration I tested, the A515-54-51DJ, bumps that base model’s processor from a dual-core Intel Core i3 to a quad-core i5, and doubles the memory to 8GB and storage to 256GB — well worth the extra money. And, if you’re able to spend about $100 more, you can get it with a new 10th-gen Core i5, entry-level Nvidia MX250 discrete graphics and a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD. That’s a lot of performance for everything from day-to-day basics to simple photo and video editing to gaming on low to medium settings.
All the performance, none of the glory
Like any budget-friendly laptop worth its salt, Acer puts most of your money toward good internal components and not into things like an all-metal chassis or an ultrabright high-res touchscreen. For example, my Aspire 5 had a similar configuration to Lenovo’s premium Yoga C930 two-in-one. Performance is about the same between the two but the Yoga is twice the price. What’s more, you can pop the Aspire’s bottom off and add more memory or increase storage on your own, something fewer and fewer premium models will let you do.
The Acer is mostly plastic, though it’s capped with a thin sheet of aluminum to class it up a bit. Unfortunately mine ended up with a slight dent at the top of the display, which also made it a little too easy to peel the bezel off from around the screen (it snaps right back into place). That’s not likely to happen on a pricier model, but hey, it does make the Aspire more serviceable at least. My point is, the build quality is fine for what you’re paying, but don’t expect the durability of a premium laptop.