Looking at the Acer Aspire E3-111 to replace an aging Dell XPS M1530

I am looking to purchase the Acer Aspire E3-111 for my wife. She currently has a Dell XPS M1530, but this was bought around late-2007, so is really starting to age a bit.

Can anybody who has this laptop recommend it for light media consumption, and daily lesson planning for a teacher. It will need to run Smart Notebook software, that's the main requirement.

The XPS does still work, but has already had the well known issue with the graphics card, which I paid £90 a couple of years ago to get a bit more life out of it. It's generally in good condition apart from one button on the trackpad which is quite worn now.

The Dell has the Core 2 Duo T8100 CPU, 3GB Ram, and a 320GB HDD. The Acer only has a Celeron and 4GB RAM, but i'm hoping the performance of these chips is better than a celeron from 2007.... It does look like it has much better power consumption than the Core 2 Duo, but performance of the CPU may be about the same, or possibly even worse.

Even if performance is only the same as the old XPS, it should run it fine, but the laptop has other advantages, with it being newer the size and power consumption is better, and it's also obviously lighter and smaller, being an 11.6" laptop compared to the 15.4" XPS.

At this price (£220) i'm not expecting blisteringly fast speeds obviously, but need to be sure it's worth getting one, or if it's going to run dog slow. There will be no gaming, no video encoding etc. it's mainly "office" type of use. Thinking of ordering it from the UK Microsoft Store in the new few weeks.

 

I had the V3-111 version with the Pentium N3530 and sent it back this morning.

That processor easily handled typical office/media things, as long as you don't plan on editing big images or video. Don't know about the Celeron.
The battery life was also very good. And it is fanless which was also nice.

One big problem i had with it is that it had really ty wifi.
And the other problem i had was with the screen. It is a touchscreen in a body that you can't fold over for "tablet mode", which in my view is unnecessary. It had really bad glare.
I also didnt like that they put a lot of the input ports in the back.

The travelmate b115 line seems to be like the V3-111 i had without the touchscreen.

In the end the wifi and the screen made me sent it back.

edit: just realized this was about the E3. ignore my post