Acer Aspire V3-371 review

Budget laptops rarely have distinctive designs, as manufacturers abandon creativity for cheaper materials and a low price. Acer’s Aspire V3-371 bucks that trend with a genuinely attractive look, which immediately elevates it above its rivals.  At just 1.5kg and 1.7cm thick, it’s also very portable.

The white lid is very subtly textured with patches that shimmer and shine as you move it around. It looks like it’s made from quality material even if it actually feels like plastic. With the lid closed, the small ridge between the bottom of the lid and the back of the laptop makes it easier to see the status lights, letting you know if it’s switched on, asleep or charging whether you have the screen open or closed.

USB ports are in rather short supply, with just two on the right edge and only one USB3-compatible connector. There’s a full-size HDMI port and a gigabit Ethernet port here, too. On the left there’s an SD card reader and a combined 3.5mm headset port. The built-in speakers are relatively loud but unsurprisingly lack bass presence and sound a little tinny. Music and speech was clear, though.

When open and in use, the Acer Aspire V3-371 looks and feels a little toy-like thanks to cheap, slightly shiny plastics and an unsatisfyingly shallow keyboard. Typing for long periods gets a little tiresome because the keys bottom out so quickly, but we at least didn’t have any problems with missed keystrokes.

The all-in-one touchpad isn’t great. Tapping and physically pressing the mouse buttons are fine, but multi-fingered gestures were cumbersome. This is because there’s a dead zone where the touchpad won’t respond until you’ve moved your two fingers around half a centimetre, which we found a little irritating. We’re hoping this is a driver issue that may be fixed in the future, but wouldn’t count on it. Even worse, sometimes the touchpad failed to respond for seconds at a time. Acer tells us this is a known issue that requires a part to be replaced, and that models on sale in the UK do not have this problem.

Performance is otherwise fairly sprightly. The V3-371 is powered by a low-voltage Intel Core i3-4158U processor, with 4GB of RAM, which is enough for basic tasks. This may not be enough if you open lots of web browser tabs or run multiple programs at the same time. There’s one free RAM slot beneath the plastic base, meaning you can easily double your RAM to 8GB if you want to boost performance.

Challenge the dual-core processor to a web page with lots of elements such as video, adverts or animated gifs and you’ll need to wait a few seconds, but this is true of all cheap laptops and most websites are just fine. In our benchmarking tests the Aspire V3 managed an overall score of 38, so if you want to do image or video editing you’ll definitely need to buy a more powerful laptop.

One upshot of this low-power processor is battery life: in our moderate use test, which involves scrolling through web pages and playing video, it lasted 11 hours, well above the seven hours claimed by Acer. In real terms, you should be able to get a full day of work out of this machine without having to worry about plugging in.

You get a 500GB hard disk in this model, which surprisingly also comes with 8GB of SSD cache. This is a small amount of SSD space, but it helps Windows 8.1 to boot relatively quickly; we measured it at 13 seconds from a cold boot to the Windows Login screen. A further 16 seconds are required to log on and finish the startup process. As usual, Acer is guilty of loading this machine with an embarrassing amount of unsolicited bloatware. There are media apps, links to Netflix and Lovefilm, an intrusive McAfee client and some Wi-Fi tools. This continues to be a major irritation, and we wish Acer would stop clogging up its budget machines with wasteful software.

Unusually for a low-end processor, the Core i3-4158U has an Intel Iris Pro 5100 graphics chip, which deviates from the usual 4000-series HD Graphics we see on all other budget laptops. While this more powerful hardware doesn’t make a huge difference when playing modern games – in our Dirt Showdown test it could only muster 19.4fps – it should help make the laptop a little more sprightly when playing HD videos and running very basic 3D games such as Halo: Spartan Assault.

We always stress the need for a 1,920×1,080 pixel display if you’re looking to multitask with windows side-by-side, but unsurprisingly that’s out of reach for budget machines like the VS-371. While we can forgive the 1,368×768 pixel resolution, we can’t say the same of the panel’s viewing angles. There’s a very narrow range in which the screen is easily legible, with dramatic contrast shifts if you move out of this sweet spot. This won’t necessarily be a problem if you’re sitting in a room that’s not brightly lit, but if you’re outside or under bright interior lights, adjusting the screen to reduce glare results in a compromised viewing experience. Colour performance, meanwhile, is average for a laptop at this price. In our tests the screen was able to display 65.1 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. We would have liked slightly higher contrast, though: the 235:1 we measured was a disappointment, and high quality images and video will certainly lose some clarity, particularly in darker scenes.

The Acer V3-371 is a decent budget laptop with a reasonable processor and great battery life. Our main gripe is with the screen; we can forgive its low resolution but the terrible viewing angles and contrast make it noticeably worse than other budget laptops. If you’re willing to spend £250 more, the Dell Inspiron 13 7000 (Group test, Shopper 323) is a more powerful 13in laptop with a Full HD screen.