Acer Aspire V5-571 review

We were impressed with the laptop’s keyboard, though. We found it easy to type on thanks to the spaced-out Chiclet-style keys, and typing was also comfortable thanks to the fact each key had plenty of bounce and provided lots of tactile feedback. At times they felt a little too spread out, but this is generally one of the better budget laptop keyboards we’ve seen. The keyboard is also backlit by a white LED, which made the keys much easier to see in low light. It’s also always useful to have a separate numeric keypad.

The laptop’s large, all-in-one touchpad is slightly offset, but we found it didn’t get in the way while we were typing. We found it wasn’t particularly accurate or as responsive as we’d like, and we didn’t get on with the all-in-one design, which we found made clicking fiddly. We would have preferred separate buttons.

The touchpad supports multi-touch gestures, but these were particularly tricky to use correctly, and pinching the screen to zoom in was almost impossible to do with any degree of accuracy. We would also sometimes bring up the Windows 8 Charms bar or switch between individual windows unintentionally by swiping either from right to left or left to right, but we soon trained ourselves to avoid this by staying within the boundaries of the touchpad and not swiping in from its edges accidentally.

The V5’s 500GB hard disk should provide you with more than enough space for all your work and media files, and there’s a single USB3 port to attach super-fast external storage. The laptop also has a VGA and HDMI port for external displays, an SD/MMC reader and two USB2 ports.

The V5-571 may be stylish, but its performance and battery life let it down. If you’re after a budget laptop the Acer Aspire E1-571 is faster and cheaper, and if you’d like some pizazz we’d recommend the touchscreen Asus VivoBook S200.