Review: Acer Aspire E 11 Laptop

After taking a look at the inner beauty that is the Dell Latitude E7240, now we turn to a latest Bay Trail laptop from Acer, the Aspire E 11. There is also a similar but better equipped V 11 model. The particular model we look at is Acer E3-111.

Bay Trail is the latest iteration of Intel Atom platform. However, its performance is dramatically better than previous generation Atoms. So generally speaking one shouldn't carry the image of slow netbooks of the past. Acer manages to make a fanless design with this notebook.

Bottom of Aspire E3-111, 13 screws to release bottom cover

Reveals SATA hard drive, battery and system board

SATA hard drive should be replaceable with SATA SSD. However note the hard drive is of 7mm thin 2.5" form factor. Also the SATA slot is attached to system board so it may require lifting system board (sigh). There is no mSATA slot in this laptop.

The battery is secured by two screws and plugs into the system board. It's not swappable but can be replaced by user with some care.

Two screws and unplug battery from system board

No SODIMM slot seen yet. The laptop does have one SODIMM slot, but unfortunately it is buried on the other side of the system board.

A couple more screws and disconnect cables on system board

One SODIMM on the other side of system board

It's clear that Acer does not intend users to upgrade RAM in the laptop. Acer doesn't even indicate whether it supports 8GB RAM or not in their spec sheet (update: Acer now indicates a max of 8GB RAM on both the dual-core and quad-core bay trail models). Given the uncertainty and troubles of accessing the SODIMM slot, the laptop wouldn't receive RAM upgrades from most users if any.

Gigabit Ethernet and 1 USB 3.0 are present. Rest USB ports are of USB 2.0.

Bottom Line:

Aser Aspire E 11 and V 11 are major upgrades from netbooks of the past. Fanless designs are appealing as well. Intel now supports up to 8GB RAM for Bay Trail processors, but Acer does not appear to want users take advantage of it.

Score Card:

Upgradability: 2/10

Serviceability: 3/10

Portability: 8/10

Connectivity: 7/10

Expected Service Life: 3 years

(Images courtesy of MyFixGuide)

Review: Dell Latitude E7240 Laptop

In recent years the portable computing world has gone through some major changes. We have observed the rise of smart phones and relatively inexpensive tablets, lead by Apple's wildly successful iPhone and iPad. Both desktop and laptop seem to drop into decline. Microsoft also moves into touch interface big time with its Windows 8, essentially incorporating the touch interface into every personal computer.

Among the sea of changes, a trend of 'disposable computing' is also observed. More and more manufactures are dropping upgradability and serviceability in their designs, encouraging users to buy a new one rather than upgrading or repairing existing ones. This is causing a lot of waste, both in terms of users' wallet, and in terms of society in general and its environmental impact. It appears at least some of these design decisions are profit-driven.

So it is refreshing to see that Dell manages to preserve the traditional values in upgradability and serviceability with the Latitude E7240 design.

Single latch to release the removable battery

E7240 features a single-latch user-removable battery. After releasing two screws, a gentle push also releases the bottom cover.

Two screws secure the bottom cover

With the bottom cover removed, two SODIMM sockets and two mSATA slots reveal themselves.

Dell chooses to exclusively use mSATA instead of 2.5" SATA drives, and it puts two mSATA slots so power users can expand the capacity of SSD. This is a sensible choice for ultraportables as mSATA SSD's has been catching up in capacity with the recent Samsung 840 Evo mSATA SSD up to 1TB, which means one can already fit E7240 with 2TB of fast SSD storage.

The two SODIMM sockets would support up to 16GB RAM. This should allow the laptop a generous life of many years. In my opinion, RAM capacity now plays a more important role in PC obsolescence than CPU processing power.

The laptop features the latest Intel Haswell 15-watt processors, so one can expect pretty crisp performance. 3 USB 3.0 ports and 1 Gigabit Ethernet port are present, so the connectivity of E7240 is excellent, considering many ultrabooks need extra ethernet adapter cable. 

There are some early user complaints of loud noise of the cooling fan. Apparently one of the parts suppliers provided less than ideal quality fans. One way to reduce this problem is to change the power options setting of 'minimum processor state' from 100% to 5%. Fan noise on ultraportable systems with higher-end cpus has long been hit and miss, I would love to see Dell make a similar fanless design with the Haswell ULX series processors. The last fanless Dell laptop I remember is the Latitude X1 released in 2005.

Bottom Line:

Dell Latitude E7240 is one of the most upgradable and user serviceable ultraportable laptops on the market.

Score Card:

Upgradability: 9/10

Serviceability: 10/10

Portability: 8/10

Connectivity: 10/10

Expected Service Life: 10 years

(Image courtesy of MyFixGuide)