Acer Aspire R7 review - The Verge

Software and performance

Flashy, but only skin deep

Inside the wild, crazy, weird body of the Aspire R7 runs a fairly vanilla version of Windows 8. Acer preloads about a dozen apps, including the popup-inducing Norton Antivirus, plus third party apps like Netflix, Ebay, and the unfortunately-named Didlr. All can be removed easily enough, and as usual they're crowded into a single section of the Start screen called "Acer apps."

It's all powered by a 1.8GHz Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a hybrid hard drive — 20GB of solid-state storage, which makes booting and resuming fast, plus a 500GB spinning disk. The specs aren't remarkable, but Acer actually apportioned power well; most apps don't require a lot of processing power, but multitaskers need a lot of RAM, and 6GB is a lot of RAM. For basic tasks, it works fine, though I did notice a few more stutters and slightly longer loading times than I'd expect to see on a higher-end laptop. Gaming's basically impossible, of course, thanks to the integrated graphics.

OTHER THAN THE HARDWARE, EVERYTHING ABOUT THE R7 IS DECIDEDLY AVERAGE

It all runs fairly cool, though it does get a bit noisy as the R7 spits its hot air out the back. Gaming will heat the chassis a little, as will the occasional four-dozen-browser-tab extravaganza, but for the most part it's fine. It boots and resumes quickly, though the power button is oddly unresponsive sometimes — it can take a couple of seconds before anything happens, though once it gets going it's fully booted in only about 10 seconds. That's not the button's only problem, either — since it's mounted on the side it's way too accessible, and the R7 had a nasty habit of turning on in my bag, lid closed and all, and draining the battery.

Battery life is decidedly average, like so many things about the R7's performance. It lasted 4 hours and 20 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images at 60 percent brightness. That's a mediocre score, and lower than I'd expect — given the size and heft of the R7 I figured there had to be battery to spare.

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