To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
We love the sleek, slim metallic styling of the Acer Aspire Timeline U M5-581TG. It’s also light, thin and tough enough to carry anywhere. It carries Ultrabook branding, though at 2.4kg it’s heavier than most laptops with that label. It’s a singularly lovely object, but the M5-581TG isn’t without its unfortunate quirks of design. Most notable of these is the positioning of the touchpad.
There’s very little space on the wrist rest to the left of the pad, and we found ourselves unable to type comfortably without brushing it and moving the cursor to a random location on the screen. This is, needless to say, intensely annoying when typing long documents. Over time we were able to adapt our typing style to largely avoid brushing it, but it’s a nuisance nonetheless. You’ll probably have to use a program such as Touchfreeze, which automatically disables the touchpad when you’re typing.
Disregarding this issue, the keyboard, with its slim numeric keypad on the right, is accurate to type on, while the touchpad is sensitive and fairly comfortable to use. Its integrated buttons don’t make life particularly easy if you need to click and drag, such as when you have to copy files from one folder to another, however. As with other laptops with this type of touchpad, we found it was easiest to copy and paste files than drag and drop.
The rest of the chassis’ design is much more sensible. Most of the ports are at the back, including an HDMI output, Gigabit Ethernet port and three USB ports. Two of these are USB3. The ports’ positioning on the rear rather than the sides makes it marginally more difficult to connect devices, but means that you won’t have to move trailing cables out of your way, and is more convenient when using a wired mouse if you have a narrow desk. Unusually for such a slim laptop, there’s a DVD-RW drive as well as the expected SDXC card reader. The specification is rounded out with a 500GB hard disk and dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi. The laptop also has a 20GB SSD, which is configured as a cache disk to help improve boot and application loading times.
Audio output is covered by a 3.5mm headset port which can also take standard stereo headphone or speaker connections. The integrated speaker is okay for voice and a spot of YouTube but is too tinny and lacking in bass for music. The glossy 15.6in 1,366×768 display isn’t quite as glaringly reflective as the displays of some rival laptops, and while it’s not the brightest around, colours are vivid and the screen has a surprisingly good range of viewing angles as well as even backlighting.
The laptop has plenty of power for its price, thanks to a dual-core Intel Core i5-3317U processor. The laptop managed an overall score of 45 in our benchmark tests, and is equipped with 6GB of RAM, which is plenty for anything short of heavy duty image editing or video processing. There’s also a dedicated graphics processor, which you don’t usually find on laptops at this price. It’s an Nvidia GeForce GT 640M with 1GB of dedicated memory, and it achieved a brilliant 53fps in our Dirt Showdown test, which we run at 1,280×720 with 4x anti-aliasing and High detail. When we raised the resolution to the laptop’s native 1,366×768 the game still ran at 49.6fps, so you won’t have any trouble playing games on the M5-581TG. It also did well in our battery life test, lasting for eight hours and 10 minutes.
This is an outstanding laptop with just one flaw: the poor positioning of the touchpad. We never quite got the knack of typing without brushing our palm against it and seeing our cursor move up a line. This makes it incredibly difficult to rate the M5 – being able to type easily is critical. If you favour an external keyboard or always type with your hands well clear of the wrist rest, or don’t mind installing a program to help manage mis-taps, this is an excellent portable laptop which can even play games. However, we prefer the more sensible keyboard and touchpad layout of the cheaper five-star Dell Inspiron 15 and the sheer power of MSI CX61, both of which gained Best Buy awards.
