Acer Aspire E1-571 review

We weren’t particular fans of the keyboard. We’re used to seeing Chiclet-style keyboards with spaces between the keys, which makes typing easier. The E1-571’s keys have no space between them whatsoever, and typing feels cramped. The arrow keys are also tiny, so you may be better off turning off Num Lock and using the numeric keypad’s arrows instead. The keys themselves had plenty of bounce, but it took a while to get up to full typing speed thanks to their close proximity to each other. We would have rather lost the numeric keypad and had a more generously-spaced keyboard.

The offset touchpad is similarly compact, and is much smaller than we’d expect on a laptop of this size. However, we did like its slightly textured surface, which made it easy to use multi-touch gestures in Windows 8. It was particularly easy to use pinch to zoom on the touchpad, but swiping from right-to-left to bring up the Charms bar didn’t always work first time.

We did have trouble brushing the touch pad’s scroll bar when reaching for the numeric keypad, which caused the document we were working on to shoot up the screen. You could always use a utility such as Touchfreeze to disable the touchpad while you type. The touchpad’s dedicated buttons could also do with being more responsive, as they didn’t always register our clicks.

The laptop has a 15.6in display with a standard 1,366×768 resolution and a gloss finish. The finish helps make colours particularly bright and vibrant, but did cause a few problems with reflections when we tried viewing our test photos in a room with plenty of overhead lights. We had no problems with the laptop’s contrast levels, as our test photos showed up plenty of detail in both light and dark areas of our test images. The screen’s also plenty bright enough for everyday use.

The Acer Aspire E1-571 is a fine laptop with an impressive specification for the price and a good screen. We didn’t get on with the keyboard particularly well, so we wouldn’t use it to write a novel, but it’s a great buy for simple everyday tasks if you’re on a tight budget.