#n2840

First off, I like the keyboard. Call them 'chiclet' style or 'island' style, I got used to the keys after spending a short time typing on them. Now, I am used to full sized keyboards and love numpads to death, but the keys on this laptop took just a little bit getting used to, and within days, I was quickly typing away.

At first, I thought the lack of buttons on the touchpad would sting, but boy was I wrong. Double finger taps and slides work nicely. Tapping and clicking work as intended. No complaints here. For a 11.6 inch laptop, the touchpad is a comfortable size and a joy to use.

I'm glad Insert, Delete, Pgup, Pgdown, Home and End keys are available even if you have to use the Fn key to activate Home and End. I use these keys and can't live without them.

Now, on to the bad.

With only 2GB of RAM, the system feels sluggish and woefully inadequate at handling tasks. Granted, this was my first time using Windows 8.1 since my trip from 98 > XP > Vista, but boy was this machine struggling at times to keep up.

The N2840 Dual Core processor won't be winning any awards any time soon but fire off a few tabs in Chrome, listen to music on YouTube and watch performance plummet.

Maybe I'm an idiot. But I couldn't exactly pinpoint what was causing disk activity to hit 100%. Was it the HDD slowing things down due to excessive and constant read/write operations? Or, was it the underpowered system from the get go?

Now, I am looking forward to throwing in an 8GB stick of RAM and swapping out the HDD for a SSD drive. As much as I'd love to use Windows 8.1 as my daily driver, and, also use the Acer Aspire ES1 while retiring my old HP laptop (which still works -- though it lags at times), I'm having second thoughts on Windows 8.1 (with Bing).

I've not spent enough time with the Metro Interface, but I don't like it nor dislike it enough to wish it away.