Review of Acer Aspire V5-131-2629 11.6" Laptop (Black)

Customer Ratings:
List Price: $440.53
Sale Price: $348.23
Today's Bonus: 21% Off

Long story short. I wanted an inexpensive 11.6 inch notebook with Windows 7 to travel with and use in and around my home. I found it with the Acer V5-131-2629.

When I discovered this Windows 7 laptop, I was excited to find that it was still available in mass quantities. In fact, mine was manufactured only a couple of months ago. I really didn't want to go the Windows 8 route for what I was trying to accomplish with this laptop.

This laptop had everything I was looking for; Windows 7 Home Premium, Intel Celeron 1007U 1.5 GHz dual core processor, 11.6" screen (1366x768), 4GB DDR3 ram memory, 500GB hard drive, Intel GMA HD Graphics, WIFI A, G, N and Bluetooth 4.0. It also has three USB ports (2.0) and not 3.0 as advertised along with HDMI, VGA and Ethernet ports. It also comes with a 6-cell lithium ion battery with a battery life of 6.5 hours. The battery does protrude at the bottom of the laptop, but in turn gives it a nice angle to use. You can order a four cell battery replacement if you want a slimmer and flush look to the laptop at the expense of battery life. I ordered one and will use the 6-cell battery as a spare.

The laptop itself has a great design and form factor. If you have seen Acer's Chromebook C710 11.6" laptop, this is the same exact laptop, but in black and the inclusion of Windows 7. The chiclet keyboard and screen are very good. It is very easy to open the back panel for any user upgrades such as upgrading the ram or hard drive to an SSD. All you have to do is remove one screw and slide the back panel off.

After using this laptop, I'm very pleased with it. The Windows Experience Index rates it 4.4 out of the box with no upgrades. It is very fast and has no problems streaming 1080p video. I have noticed no lag at all.

If you want the flexibility of a laptop without the limitations of a tablet, this Acer laptop offers lots of bang and a real good look for the buck. I strongly recommend it.

I have a video of the laptop hands on. Check out my youtube channel HDiNDEMAND.

Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>

I am upgrading to this unit from an Aspire One 751, which was also based on a dual-core Celeron but from the Core2 generation. Other than not being a fan of click pads (industry standard these days) and the lousy internal speakers, it's hard for me to find things about this notebook I don't like, especially considering the $350 price tag. I was surprised to see that Acer didn't cheap out and provided a nice 6-cell battery.

I had pretty specific criteria when considering a replacement for my old model:

-A low-end CULV ivy bridge intel CPU that doesn't produce too much heat

-RAM expansion up to at least 8GB

-11.6" Matte LCD screen

-Windows 7 or Linux

-Decent battery life (4+ hours per charge in real world use)

-Low Cost

This was really the only one out there I could find that met all my demands.

I also learned that Celeron 1007U in this model has Intel HD 2500 graphics, which is supposed to be supported in OSX 10.8, so this could possibly be a good contender for running OSX86.

I'll give this one 4.5/5 stars for the lousy speakers (you get what you pay for)

Best Deals for Acer Aspire V5-131-2629 11.6" Laptop (Black)

Although I only got this laptop this week I am very pleased with it. I was looking for something in between a regular laptop and a tablet and this is it. It only weights about 3 lbs which is perfect. It still has a full keyboard and a 12 inch screen so it is not hard for me to use but it is light to carry around. I did order a case for it. It came easy to set up for a wireless network. I got Skype loaded right away and it is great b/c it has a camera installed so works well with Skype. I wanted Windows 7 and it has that so I am also pleased with that. So far the battery life seems decent and I am trying to keep it charged up for when I leave the house with it.

Honest reviews on Acer Aspire V5-131-2629 11.6" Laptop (Black)

My three plus year old Acer Aspire one Netbook started to cause me problems, slow and overheating.

I found this Acer Aspire V5-131 on Amazon for a good price with Windows 7, which I wanted.

They advertised 3 USB 3 ports. Which it did not have, only 3 USB 2 ports. That is why I gave it only 4 stars.

It seems like a very good Notebook, small with full size keyboard.

Boots in 45 seconds.

Battery life is over 5 hours.

I ran a two hour movie from the hard drive 2 and 1/2 times until the battery dropped to 10%. (a little over 5 hours)

Screen brightness was on at almost full for the duration of my test.

Windows Experience Index is 4.5. Plays, with no problems, all the video types that I tried including .mts files from my camera.

Audio from the small speakers is poor but I expected this.

HDMI work good, Bluetooth works good, and the WiFi sensitivity is good.

I tried converting my camera video (.mts files) to .wmv. Processor ran at 90 to 100 percent and CPU temp never got over 60 C.

I would recommend this laptop it to anyone who needs a simple computer.

You should have good eyesite for this small screen though.

I might install a solid state drive to give it more speed and longer battery life.

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Acer Aspire V5-131-2629 11.6" Laptop (Black)

I've had the laptop for a few days, so this is just a first impressions, but it seems pretty good so far. My last laptop was a 17" ASUS gaming machine, which performed admirably, but having since built my own desktop and really settling into the college life, I found myself wanting something smaller and less cumbersome, not to mention that the ASUS had been slowly developing problems ever since I bought it about 4 years ago.

So for this purchase, I was looking for something cheap, mostly as a mobile programming terminal, and this thing performs quite well in that aspect. It's quite small and lightweight, and has some really good battery life. I turned it on this morning at about 11 o'clock to check a few things before going to class and have had it on -or at least asleepever since (for reference, it's about 5:30 and I still have 28% remaining, which the computer claims is still well over an hour). It's certainly better than my old laptop which only just recently (thanks to a driver update) managed to pull just over 2 hours.

The only downsides so far are that the speakers are pretty awful, but then again this should be expected and is easily counteracted by some earbuds or external speakers, and the mousepad is a little hard to use if you have big hands, but I pretty much always carry a wireless mouse with me anyways, so that still hardly an issue.

Overall:

Pros-

* Good battery life (easily 5-6 hours, more if you put it to sleep when not in use and dim the screen)

* Nice keyboard, even for those with large hands

* Decent boot time (takes about 45 seconds or so; could be made faster with an SSD)

* Comes with Windows 7, for those of us that still enjoy the interface

Cons-

* Speakers are bad (but why would you be using them anyway?)

* Touchpad is mediocre and takes some fiddling to work with, but workable

Will update if anything of note comes up.