Acer's Aspire 3 is a good entry-level device that can manage more than just simple processes in everyday use and knows how to handle multi-tasking. It can even be used for some simple image processing, but apart from that you must not expect too much from the notebook.
affordable price; nice size; sufficient performance for simple applications; low system noise; many upgrade possibilities
short battery runtime on Wi-Fi; only one USB-3.0 port; display is easily warped; low brightness