When it comes to reviewing a product, I have an incurable complex: I cannot stop myself from reading all the negative reviews about it first. I had promised myself to put an end to this addiction, but when I was assigned to do a review on the Acer Aspire S7, I found myself Googling “Acer S7 Reviews” or “Problems with Acer S7…”.
Most of the reviewers had complained about the fan noise in Acer Aspire S7, and others about its short battery life and its awkward keyboard. There were also complaints about the touch screen (not useful?) and the graphic card not being suitable for gaming. Then there were reviews (some obviously written by Mac fanatics) saying that the S7 could never replace a Macbook Air (which sounds exactly like what my dad used to say to my mom whenever she caught him looking at another woman).
After satisfying my habit of reading negative reviews, I used S7 for 3 weeks—actually I should say I abused it for 3 weeks. Using interrogation methods mastered by brutal investigators, I hardly let the S7 sleep for more than 3 hours. Even in the middle of the night when I was going to the fridge to have a snack, I was waking the poor S7 up to run CNN live streaming before I would go back to sleep. My goal was to truly test the system’s performance and find out if the S7 had been wrongly accused.
The CWB guys had installed 64 bit Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on the system, therefore my next experiment was using Photoshop on the Aspire S7 with pretty large image files. Of course I would also be editing HD footage in Premier Pro. Here, I was pleasantly surprised with the systems overall performance and ability to handle these “heavy” programs.
I found Acer Aspire S7’s design quite elegant, “Chic” if you will, and to my taste it beats the Macbook Air in a beauty contest. It’s thin, and when I say thin, I mean thin thin at less than half an inch! The S7 is also very light, weighing in at only 2.86 lbs. The glass cover gives it a very classy look.
The screen on the Aspire S7 screen brings you full HD resolution, great for watching movies or editing images and videos. Let’s not forget the touch-screen, which comes
handy in some cases and makes browsing among apps or on the internet a lot easier than using a mouse or touch pad. There is a bit of a learning curve with Windows 8 and a touchscreen, and one must be a little adventurous to jump in and discover how everything works. Once you take the leap, you’ll start loving it!
The S7’s keyboard gets the job done. Yes, the keys are too close to each other, but it does not deserve the kind of drama a few reviewers have created around it. I got used to it and I have no problem with it. My loan gripe: the backlit keys could have a brighter color.
But let’s talk about the main complaint about the Acer Aspire S7 in most of the reviews, the noisy fan. I pushed the system to the edge by running multiple, power-hungry programs for long periods and I also streamed live video for hours. The S7 stayed quiet over 90% of the time and, even in rare instances when you could hear the fan running, it was not terribly loud. Actually, the only time it became noticeably audible was during a virus-scan.
Battery life was about 4 to 4 ½ hours on average with heavy use. I had no problems at all with the super-fast on the S7—browsing the internet and watching movies on the web is a joy.
I loved to carry the S7 around with me, as it is very light and thin. Just like when you are driving a nice car, people received me better and where impressed with the look of S7. I know a unique product is in my hands when waiters and restaurant guests come to my table to ask me about my laptop.
As someone who often edits video and follows crews on location for shoots, the Acer Aspire S7 is a light and easy to carry system for preliminary organizing and rough edits of the shot footage. Cinephiles will fall in love with S7 as a system that allows them to watch movies anywhere they wish.
I strongly recommend Acer’s Aspire S7 for film fans and filmmakers as an elegant, thin and light-weight Ultrabook with some muscle to boot. This system goes where traditional workstations can’t, and is ideal for watching movies, streaming video, email and web browsing tasks, preliminary audio/video editing, and going where your old notebook couldn’t.