With high-end laptops, you're getting an ever slimmer and lighter footprint, backed by a heavy pocket, while budget laptops are wired for performance over looks at rock-bottom prices. Then you have midrange laptops like the Acer Aspire 5 A515-51G-53V6 that offer the best of both worlds.

While this has somewhat changed recently, Acer laptops have been historically known for their affordable price tags and overall solid value for the money, albeit with a few cut corners here and there, perfectly normal for budget devices.

This is one of a range recently launched at Thorpe Park on what in some parts of the country was the hottest day of the year. While it was an event I was unable to make I have been kept up to date by the excellent Acer PR Company, here the first offering sent to me.

The Acer Aspire 5 sits in Acer's ‘everyday computing' range and it's the epitome of the no-nonsense laptop. It's a little on the chunky side, not especially attractive to look at and, yet, it delivers the goods when it comes to performance and usability.

Good value; Great performance at this price point; Nice keyboard

Awful display; Chunky design

The Aspire lineup is Acer's everyday, middle-of-the-road range of laptops. Available in 15.6-inch or 17-inch variants, these models aren't as thin and light as the company's Swift laptops. Nevertheless, they offer good all-round performance, at prices ranging from £470 to £850.

Smart design; Good all-round performance; Keeps cool and quiet

A515 version has poor screen; Cramped cursor keys; No keyboard backlight

One of the best SSD Laptops i have ever had. Incredibly fast load and boot times paired with good graphics card, decent screen size, great sound & mic quality, long battery life with half the time to charge to full.

I chose an Acer model as I'd had one previously that served me extremely well for 10 years before purchasing this one. Setting up was easy, no issues at all. It's light, very fast and the battery lasts a good few days on medium use. Definitely would recommend

After a week's worth of use, no problems to report - I removed all the bloatware right away to help. I'm not a techie, so these comments are based on "regular folk" usage. I prefer big screens in laptops even though this makes them less portable aka not exactly lightweight.

Works well for office or general use but there are a couple of issues: -It doesn't sleep properly. Often it was on after sleep was selected -There isn't really any way to fix screen bleed -It doesn't explain when the graphics card kicks in (or if it is on all the time it is a battery waste)

Beautiful bright antiglare matte screen, awesome keyboard backlight & feel. Super powerful and boots fast(15-20 secs). In CinemaBench, I got a 75.08 on openGL and on Cpu stress test I got a score of 526. The build quality is very sturdy. a bit of a fingerprint magnet inside but feels super premium.