Acer Aspire E3-111

It’s a stylish notebook, meant for people who’re willing to sacrifice performance and features for price — Ashok Pandey

Aspire E3-111 is a budget notebook that is compact in size, gets metallic finish and comprises a decent keyboard. Under the eye-catching shell. It packs a quad-core Celeron processor that promises basic Windows capability and
Web browsing.

The pretty plastic shell: The compact sized notebook comes in a complete plastic shell that is expected at such a low price. It gets brushed metal finish on the top and a matte surface at the back, only the display bezel is glossy. The lid easily swivels to a great extent. The fairly basic 11-inch computer is slim and lightweight that makes it easy to pick up and go. Though, the display has a basic 1366x768 resolution, yet the screen has an astonishingly high brightness. It’s not really impressive in terms of color reproduction and offers limited viewing angles, yet we can say it is one of the best in this price range. It has a full-size keyboard and a smooth touchpad with the same blue color as the rest of the laptop. The touchpad is relatively wide, measuring 4.1 inches across.

Despite the compact design, Acer manages to include all important interfaces such as combo audio, USB 2.0 & 3.0, memory card reader, Kensington lock slot, Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI. Only VGA-out port is missing, but the user can use HDMI-to-VGA adapter. The notebook supports 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi standards and Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity and has a webcam that is decent for video chats.

Energy efficient system is perfect for browsing and other basic tasks: E3-111 boasts an Intel Celeron N2930 processor, 4GB RAM and runs on Windows 8.1. The notebook comes preloaded with most of the required apps such as MS office, audio/video player, IE, Acer’s portal and remote file etc. It runs smooth and performs most of the tasks, but it’s not a device for heavy usage. It is useful for routine internet browsing such as Facebook and typing up the occasional office/school paper. The operations become slow and lag performance while streaming media. Intel HD Graphics offer decent support for streaming media and rendering Web pages, but you can’t think of playing graphics-intensive games on it, only games like Candy Crush will work.

In our benchmark tests, the notebook scored 1192 in PC Mark Home Accelerated 3.0 and P233 in 3D Mark ICE. Though, the system doesn’t deliver wow performance, yet the one big benefit of using a low-powered Celeron processor is its energy efficiency. The notebook offers long-lasting backup of more than 7 hours and in our battery test, it lasted for 4 hours 42 minutes.

It has 500 GB hard drive that spins with 5400 revolutions per minute. The notebook doesn’t have a fan so, you will hardly get any noise out of it, but you will feel a little heat which is within an acceptable range in idle mode. Acer equipped stereo speakers on the device’s underside which produce a thin sound that lacks bass and can be useful only for occasionally watching videos or listening to music.