Acer Aspire V5-571P-6499 Pro Reviews

The Acer Aspire V5-571P-6499 is a stylish and slim, yet inexpensive (street price under $700) 15.6-inch touchscreen system which takes full advantage of the Windows 8 touch-optimized interface. The build quality as well as the ergonomics are acceptable for a budget system. We appreciate the fact that Acer manged to squeeze an optical drive into the chassis and have no gripes with the overall performance: the system is powerful enough to handle the daily workload and stays cool doing so. We do have issues with the rather anemic battery life of 3 hours and the very low brightness of the display, which makes working outdoors very hard indeed. If a touchscreen is a necessity, both the 14-inch Asus VivoBook S400CA-CA006H and the 13-inch Sony Vaio SV-T1312V1E are viable alternatives. Sony now also offers 14- and 15-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) models in the T-Series. Various versions of the 15.6-inch HP Spectre XT TouchSmart (now with 1.9GHz Intel Core i7-3517U; 1920 x 1080 pixels) start at around $1250. If it doesn't have to be a touchscreen, Acer's own V5-571-6892 offers a 1.8 GHz i5-3337U processor, a 500 GB hard drive, and 6 GB of RAM - all for about $70 less (street price ~$630).

A thrifty price and big, responsive touch screen make the Acer Aspire V5-571P-6499 a pleasant way to make your acquaintance with Windows 8. It's also surprisingly slim for a 15-inch budget notebook, but miscellaneous gripes keep it from perfection.

The Acer Aspire V5 is a pretty sleek laptop at first glance. But don’t be fooled by its silky-smooth silver exterior – there’s not a whole lot going on inside this laptop. Sure, it’s got its strengths: the touchscreen is responsive and smooth, and video looks and sounds pretty good. But it’s got a heck of a lot more weaknesses, such as poor overall performance, lower-than-average battery life, a strangely loud fan, and a noticeably low screen resolution.

Acer's middle-of-the-road 15-inch Aspire V5 is neither inspiring nor especially disappointing. It stands out by adding a touch screen to Windows 8 at a very reasonable price, and especially caught my eye because of some holiday/Black Friday price breaks. At $699 or so, it's worth a look. If you can find one for much less, it's hard to beat for value.