Aspire 5 A515-45-R74Z Slim Laptop | 15.6" Full HD IPS | AMD Ryzen 5 5500U Hexa-Core Mobile Processor | AMD Radeon Graphics | 8GB DDR4 | 256GB NVMe SSD | WiFi 6 | Backlit KB | Windows 11 Home

Purchased this laptop because I didn't want to use my gaming rig for work and other basic tasks. Build quality is far better than I expected at this price point. Sure, it would be great to have a solid aluminum case instead of just the top, but that is to be expected for the price. Took it apart as soon as it was delivered so I could add a 8gb ram stick and a second ssd. Installation was super easy. Kudos to acer for adding the ability to install a 2.5" hard drive with provided hardware. Not many other rigs at this price point that have a second drive option. You can also upgrade the nvme drive if you want to. Backlit keyboard is also a huge plus and it is the perfect brightness in my opinion. Keyboard is comfortable to type on and the addition of a 10 key is another bonus at this price point. Screen is nice and bright with no glare. Honestly a much better picture quality than I expected for a sub $500 laptop. It has all the ports you need to get the job done. 2x usb 3 1x usb 2 1x usbc "Out only unfortunately" You have to charge the laptop with included charger. Lan/Ethernet Headphone jack Performance is where this laptop really shines. I am dual booting the stock windows 11 and linux mint. Both run flawlessly and super fast. Hasn't slowed down at all with multiple apps and browser tabs running at once. Everything runs just as fast as my desktop gaming rig. Would't run any high end games on it of coarse since it is not built for that and has no deddicated video card. Pretty sure you could run minecraft or wow/diablo on lower settings. Battery life is also amazing. I am getting about 8 hours of usage before I plug the battery in at 30%. That is with full screen brightness, wifi and bluetooth enabled. It took 10 hours to completely drain the battery after the first charge. I would recommend this laptop to anyone that wants a solid rig at a great price for everything other than gaming. It is also very light for a full featured laptop, so it would be a great choice for school or business for someone that needs/wants to carry around a full sized laptop. I don't think you could find a better laptop for a student at this price.

Checks just about all of the boxes! Lightweight, backlit keyboard, full screen, WiFi 6 fast, quick charging, loaded with good quality. Only box not checked, hard to open! No indentations for your fingers to open. You have to get your fingernails between the keyboard and the screen. Not a big deal but could be better.

After several months of using this Acer Aspire A515-45 laptop, I gotta say it's been an amazing experience. For under $500, you get a really fast, extremely lightweight, and ultra portable laptop. Right out of the box and after the setup, this laptop opens everything insanely quick with the help of the SSD that comes with it. I'm coming from another Acer Aspire laptop from a few years ago that had a standard HD so this is a very nice boost, although the big downside is the not-so-big capacity of the hard drive. At only 256gb (which is normal for laptop SSDs I guess), it can't hold much. Thankfully it comes with a hard drive expansion kit, though it can be a little confusing to use. The possibility is there, but you can also get an external hard drive for that extra space. Even after using more than half of the given hard drive space, this thing still hasn't slowed down and that's one of the things I'm really liking about this laptop. While we're still on the topic of speed, the new Ryzen processor on this laptop is pretty quick too. Equipped with a Ryzen 5 5500U quad core processor, it's a huge boost from the old duo core processor I had on my previous laptop. Though it can't run games like Fortnite on high or max settings at a consistent 60 fps, bumping down some graphics and sacrificing some quality features on Fortnite would help you achieve the near-consistent 60 fps that would help you get those victory royales. The 8 GB ram that comes with this laptop is also nice and should be a standard among all laptops nowadays. I haven't opened the laptop yet to see if there are any open additional expansion slots like my previous Acer laptop, but if there are it would be an even bigger plus. The keyboard on this Aspire 5 feels great. Typing feels amazing, somewhat comparable to a Macbook and with the grey and black color scheme of this laptop, it even looks kind of like one. The sleek texture of the laptop is satisfying to have your palm rest on while you're typing up a storm. The picture quality is what you'd expect from a laptop in 2022; clear picture, sharp images, great pixels, and all those good stuff. Sound on the other hand though is not so great on this Acer Aspire 5. No matter what position I have it on; laying flat, screen side down with the speakers facing me, elevated a little bit from the surface, the sound isn't something to be proud of. It feels a little muffled and even pumping the volume to 100%, increasing everything I can to 100%, the sound is still very weak which is a shame because it makes me resort to using my bluetooth devices to get better sound quality. Speaking of sound quality, I've tried to use my AudioTechnica 2020USB+ microphone on this laptop for work, but at first without knowing, I pluggged it into a USB 3.0 port on the left side and not knowing, the recording quality was very VERY bad. It wasn't until after playback that I discovered the microphone was incompatible (along with my other microphones) with the USB 3.0 side. Not sure if it's just my laptop, but thankfully there's a USB 2.0 port on the right side that works just fine. It took a few days of troubleshooting with Realtek HD audio (which was what I used on my old laptop) to get the sound quality back to standard. Let's talk more about the ports on this laptop. There's 1 USB 2.0 and 2 USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port (which apparently is rare nowadays on laptops? I know of some people who don't have HDMI ports on them). There's a USB-C port and an ethernet port if you're into being hardwired to your internet. There's also a tiny port that looks like micro HDMI (is that a thing?) or something looks similar to USB-C but a little smaller. I think the last thing to cover before I talk bad about this laptop is the battery which has an amazing life from the beginning. I've been able to do some work and play video games for a good 4ish hours before it asks to be plugged in. On normal usage where you're just browsing or working or not using really process-heavy tasks, you could probably get 7-8 hours on this on a single charge. Charging this laptop is also pretty quick taking 2-3 hours to get it back to full. Also something that's nice that the laptop came with was a webcam privacy protector! And it didn't have just one, but two protectors! Simply take it out of the tiny bag it came in and stick in on where the webcam is and you can slide it to cover the webcam and block out any FBI people watching you browse TikTok. Some qualms I have about this laptop are the function key shortcuts. First of all, by default the function keys are disabled (or enabled, whichever makes it so you have to do extra steps to use them). This means you have to start up your laptop and go to the system menu and enable (or disable) the function keys to make them work as they should. Not sure why this was set as a default, but they're there and they're really useful for everything that you do from lowering and turning down brightness, volume control, and putting the laptop to sleep among other functions. Another (personal) problem I have with the volume control is that on my previous laptop, the volume control function keys were on the arrow which makes sense because if you want the volume up or down, you hold the fn key and press up or down on the arrow! On this laptop, it got moved to the F11 and F10 key respectively. Instead, the arrow keys have the pause/play for up and stop for down and the left arrow has back while the right arrow has forward. One last thing about the function key is that while the placement for the brightness makes sense sort of where raising brightness (F4) is to the right of lowering brightness (F3), the icons on those keys don't make sense! The brightness icons both have a sun, but one is empty in the middle. You'd think that means the brightness is getting lowered as opposed to the icon with the filled in sun, but nope, F3 with the filled in sun means lowering your brightness. Who'd have thought? One last complaint I have about this laptop is the lack of an SD card reader. Maybe this laptop isn't geared towards people who use SD cards often, but my old Acer laptop that costed under $350 at the time I bought it had pretty much all of what this laptop has and an SD card reader on top of it. Would be nice but not detrimental because I know not many people rely on it, but I figure it's not hard to add since it can go in front of the laptop where your left wrist is. Also, while it is good the laptop came with a hard drive upgrade kit with screws and drive holder, taking out the underside of this laptop was a pain compared to my previous laptop. This one has ELEVEN screws you NEED to take out in order to access the inside. This is a lot compared to the only THREE screws needed for my previous Acer laptop. Needless to say, this was a huge time sink especially when all the screws were so tight that it took more than a minute to unscrew them. All miniscule complaints aside, this is a great laptop in its price bracket. If you're looking for a really lightweight and quick work station on the go, this laptop is pretty good and I'd recommend this one. It took me a few days of comparing other laptops and this one was my choice.

I had a different brand laptop that was a few years old and the video card suddenly crashed and I could not use an external monitor either so I had to replace it. I decided to give the Acer Aspire 5 a try and it really surprised me and out performed my expectations. I really like the expansion cable and SSD drive holder that comes with it. Acer was very smart allowing such an easy upgrade as I added another SSD drive and I also upgraded my ram. This model has the ram built in to the mother board and has only 1 expansion slot so that is the only drawback I could find but for the price and all the extras that it comes with I can deal with 1 expansion slot as it is fast and great for the office and very lightweight for travelling. The battery lasts and lasts and I like the lighted keyboard. Although it is not the most powerful laptop one could use for gaming it is still pretty fast. It is lightweight as well. It is a wonderful laptop for the price and it is great for work as I mentioned earlier the battery lasts and lasts. I am very pleased with the quality of this laptop especially for the price and would recommend it - it is great for work and has good video quality as well as sound quality for zoom meetings etc. If you are looking for a gaming laptop then it may not be the top choice but for an all around laptop it is a very good laptop for the price.

I've been pretty happy with this computer more than a year later. It's no gaming computer. And it will crash periodically for no apparent reason. It boots up in a few seconds, so it's not a huge deal as far as time lost. You just have to make sure that you're saving your work or have it set to auto-save

Bought this for work as I only need it for customer information and filling out forms. Sends forms to the printer WAY faster than my old laptop with Wifi 6. Very happy with that....Thought this version had biometrics, it does not. Web cam quality is potato quality. Works for basic Zoom calls, but I would invest in a better webcam if video quality matters. Touch pad works great, especially during typing...mouse cursor doesn't go flying if you don't have the wrong hand positioning. Still prefer a mouse for web browsing, but the pad works will. Keyboard is fantastic. Usually hate Laptop keyboards, but this feels like I can find home easier and the keys are effortless, yet have solid feedback. 10 key is smaller, but I don't mind as I rarely need a full hand spectrum sized 10 key for numbers. I'd consider this a great value as I got it for 26% off. Under $400 and I can add more Ram and extra Storage...Hard to complain. Haven't tested battery life and still need to get everything in Windows 11 figured out, but if you are looking for a basic laptop for web browsing, typing..this is a good fit. Look elsewhere if you are looking for a laptop that can crunch hard on graphics without making major upgrades to the system memory and storage.

Biggest case of buyers remorse in my life. Always bought HP with Intel hardware but figured with the reviews for this Acer Aspire 5 with AMD Ryzen 5 and Radeon graphics why not explore unfamiliar territory and see what the hype was about in the reviews. This Acer Aspire 5 for $489 Brand New shipped to the door I was astonished the laptop didn't come with an actual user manual. Was even more pissed that you can not setup and use this without first connecting to a WiFi network. For those who don't care about WiFi connections and just want a localized laptop with out brand manufacturers spying on you and gathering data your SOL. Wanted to read the user manual to see there if there was a way around this but for $489 you have to have the internet and download it. After I connected to the internet against my will the computer restarted and entered an error message that an error was encountered and it needed to restart. It did this twice with no luck just blue screens. It then went to diagnose repair screen attempting to diagnose the failure to start up with no luck only option was to shut down. After shutdown it actually loaded back up the and the very next screen was demanding to log in with a Microsoft account or sign up for one. Now there are ways around this with HP laptops. All you have to do is say no internet connection at 1st use and then you can sign in with a local account instead of logging in with a Microsoft account. For those who may not understand why this is an issue for some is when you login with a Microsoft account no matter what settings on privacy you think you can control you have zero privacy. Microsoft can see anything any everything you do on your laptop down to the keyboard typing and all activity. Oh well I know how to fix that later and I sign on with a Microsoft account. Finally get to windows and do what I always do download Firefox and Uninstall Microsoft edge. I restart the laptop to the same cycle of error loading operating system and attempt to diagnose that fails. Shut down the laptop and it loads again. Finally found out that anytime you restart the laptop whatsoever it cycles back to the same blue screens of error loading windows and diagnosing. Performed a factory restore back to complete factory settings so it was like the first time I opened the laptop up no difference. Still doing this cycle of device ran into problem gathering info, then diagnosing PC, PC cant be repaired, shut down, loads till the next time it restarts. Being upset is putting it mildly. I'm 38 and have been using computers and fixing them since I was 12, this is not a foreign language to me. This Acer Aspire 5 with AMD processor and graphics is total garbage. Brand new and it don't even work properly right out of the freakin box. I factory restored this thing 3 times and supposedly this wipes the hard drive completely and saves nothing but yet every time it re-installs it still has my name has the device owner. I started growing aggravated with HP but Acer is a complete joke. The display sucks also. Everything looks fine till you open a windows system or program property window then it's so blurry you think u have something in your eye, played with resolution and display settings and everything is clear and fine until you open a windows properties window and you can barely make out the letters. Same windows on my 3, 5 and 7 year old HP laptops zero issues but this brand new $500 Acer laptops display stops wanting to work properly over a properties window??? Who ever designed this model and it components and said yeah let's ship that out to the unexpected consumer needs banished from working in the information technology field. I wanted to get product support from Acer to address this issue but I couldn't even register this product through the preinstalled Acer Care Center software or their website, everytime I tried it gave me an error message and to try again later. So if you know a little about computers and want to fix a Brand New laptop yourself to get it to work properly I think you will be very pleased with the performance of this machine with the AMD components. UPDATE: Found the fix for above issues. Don't use the operating system or ghost recovery drive programmed into the laptop. Download windows media creation tool and perform a full wipe and installation using the USB flash drive on startup. The install will only load windows 10 but after 2-3 days windows update will automatically install windows 11. I used Driver Booster 9 to update all the drivers for the hardware which always works flawlessly, best part its free and fast and has 1 click upgrades for all drivers. After a bunch of headache and wasted time I'm pretty impressed and happy with the hardware components. I bench-marked and stress tested this PC to some remarkable results. Too bad it couldn't work properly right out of the box, someone at Acer really dropped the ball. What I like about this Acer Aspire A515 45 is that it has 2 memory slots and comes with 8GB preinstalled and is up-gradable to 32 GB. The Graphics card takes half of the preinstalled 8GB and dedicates it to graphics processing which is nice in a way but its a give and take. I had a 4GB card of DDR4 with a 2666MHz clock frequency and threw that in the unused memory slot. I was unsure how the PC would benchmark after this because the memory preinstalled was 3200MHz and that basically bottle necks the original memory card from 3200MHz down to 2666MHz but it still performed better than without it. Ideally you want to match the memory frequency with what is preinstalled to avoid this but like I said I had this 2666Mhz card already. In the near future I will match the preinstalled memory card with an after market 8GB DDR4 card with a 3200MHz frequency as well as matching the rank of the card (single rank/double rank) and all other specs. Ideally you want both slots to match down to the last detail including the memory capacity to prevent bottle necks between the processor and the motherboards ability to communicate with the memory. When I had the back off this the 2nd memory card slot was right there and accessibility but the original wasn’t visible so If you want to replace the original memory card it appears you have to remove the mother board and flip it over to get to the original used memory slot. While I was installing the added memory I scene that it has a space for an extra additional hard drive which is really great! I have a 500 GB Samsung 870 EVO SSD hard drive in one of my older HP laptops that will be going in this next. I thought I was gonna have to buy different brackets and sata cable to install the Samsung Evo SSD but they were included in the box with all the screws as well! If you buy a model with Intel products that stuff will be inside the laptop taped where the second hard drive goes. After setting up the additional Samsung hard drive so it was recognized by the laptop I used Samsung's "Magician" software to benchmark both drives and was astonished that the western digital SSD was 3 times faster than my Samsung EVO 870. My Samsung was doing almost 600MB a second read/speed and the WD was almost 2GB per second! My fastest laptop before this Acer was a HP Notebook 15 with an dual core Intel i3 processor. That HP ran me the same price as this Acer 2 years ago. It worked great but its a night and day difference between this Acer for multi tasking and for video and graphics capabilities. That HP didn’t have the extra bay for an additional hard drive either. I’m very pleased with this Acer after I removed the pre-installed operating system and software.

I'm not terribly techy, but I do use this laptop all day everyday for work and play. It's fast, and was easy to set up. The sound quality is much better than my old Acer Aspire 5 (I liked it enough to get a new one). The old one had very low sound unless one used headphones/earbuds, but this one is much louder and the quality is better. I am a Realtor and always have at least 5 tabs open in Chrome (right now I have 9). Screen quality could be clearer but I'll take it. I don't game so I have no opinion on that. It's a bit on the heavy side but that's also okay with me. No touch screen (that's also okay with me as I am a keyboard person). If you want a good little workhorse this is a great buy.