Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Right off the bat this is an ok Laptop as-is. Its got a great power frugal processor with integrated Vega graphics. Its downsides are its anemic RAM (4gb) and Tiny Hard drive. Thankfully both of these can be upgraded on the cheap to make this a real beast of a PC. Im going to tell you step by step how I took this three hundred dollar pc and made it faster, with more memory and hard drive space under a 100 bucks, including the drive cloning tools!!! 1. Purchase 4gb-16gb single DIM laptop memory - I purchased a varisys 16gb ddr4 module for $46.00 here on amazon. 2. Purchase larger NVME m.2 drive - I purchased a samsung pro 960 512gb for $42 from amazon. 3. Purchase 2 NVME usb adapters - Sold here on amazon for $8/each 4. Download paragron drive clone software. Now before I go any further I will say that the biggest bang for the buck is going to be the RAM upgrade in which it is the simplest and easiest upgrade for this system, you will get the same performance with the stock hard drive as you would the upgraded one just at a much smaller 128gb size. With the low cost of external drives you may not want to even upgrade the hard drive and just stick with external media to save larger files. After acquiring all your components the first thing you're going to want to do is disassemble the rear of the acer computer. There are 11 phillips head screws on the underside of the laptop, once those are removed use a plastic tool like a spudge or even a toothpick to gentle pry up one side of the rear case until it unclicks, from there slowly go around and lift up the rest of it, once youve gotten about a quarter way through you can simply just use your hand to free the rest of it. Once removed you will see an open DIMM slot for a memory module (thats where out 16gb stick is going) and below that the already installed m.2 128gb Hard drive. Remove the phillips head screw from the m.2 drive and remove the drive itself from the computer. At this point insert the drive into one of the USB caddys you purchased from amazon and than take your new drive and insert that one in a caddy as well. From there take both loaded hard drive caddys and put them in another windows PC you have. Once thats done ensure that the computer is recognizing both drives and than install paragon software. Once installed run paragon and choose drive clone. From there set your source drive as the original m.2 drive you removed from the acer computer and your destination drive as the newly purchased NVME drive. Choose Sector by sector copy and click next. This process will go pretty quickly and will probably only take around 5-10 minutes depending on the computer youre using to clone the drives on. Once the drive is cloned, take the new nvme drive and insert it into the Acer notebook where the old one was removed. From there pop in your new memory module into the empty memory slot above. Once one make sure things are seated well and the m.2 drive is screwed back down. Once thats done put the back case back on the computer and gently push down the backing until it clicks back into place. Once done reattatch the screws until all are reinstalled. Flip her over, and fire her up! Verify that everything works and go about your way. However I would suggest turning off windows S mode and using Home instead as you can install third party apps. Now onto my clickbait title. The computer in the picture next to the acer is my m1 macbook pro with 1tb drive and 16gb ram. Without taxes it was $1,700 bucks. I have photoshop, lightstudio, propresent all installed on it. All of which are large memory and processor dependent hogs. On my acer I have the exact same programs installed. And guess what the acer loads them quicker, renders files faster, runs cooler, and is about a quarter of the price. Battery life is about as good as my macbook, acer with movies or web browsing is around 7-8 hours of battery life. And no joke but I am now using this acer as my primary travel computer for work and design in lieu of my macbook. I like the larger screen, better keyboard layout and less worry about breaking it as its a quarter of the price. The acer itself build quality is that of 1k+ pc's and has a nice metal desgin with minimal plastic. Keyboard isnt mushy and is quite tactile for a laptop. Screen is ok, could be brighter, but still very good. Processor is a beast and will deal with anything thrown at it. Light gaming can also be done on this machine, however this isnt intended for AAA titles. All in all this is one of the more surprising purchases Ive made recently that really blew me away in terms of performance for so little investment. For a grand total of 387 (including laptop) I have a machine that rivals PC laptops costing well over a grand and macs costing nearly 2 grand!!!