Acer has recently skyrocketed in the list of the best selling laptops with their Acer Aspire AS5251. At under $400, the price cannot be beat. But does this inexpensive laptop pack enough punch to be considered among the best?

Of course, what first interests us about this AS5251 Acer laptop is the price. We are accustomed to seeing the top rated netbook come in at prices around $400, but not laptops. Laptops, typically, do not have the compromises and concessions that we find on netbooks. These compromises are found in the form of limited memory, smaller hard drives, less-powerful processors, and much smaller laptop screens.

So, let’s look at what, if any, compromises that Acer had to make to deliver us this AS5251 laptop under $400 (the current asking price is $379 at many locations).

The first thing that I noticed when I received this laptop was the look and feel of the machine. It’s quite similar to the ASUS UL80Vt-A1, which I currently rate as the best price/performance laptop on the market today. The machine is black and comes with a 15.6-inch widescreen laptop monitor that provides solid quality with a built web cam, easily enabling you to video-chat with all of your friends.

The processor on the Acer AS5251 laptop is a 2.20 GHz AMD V Series V120 single-core processor. I am normally an Intel processor devotee but this AMD processor is fast and handles video extremely well with the new Vision technology by AMD. Many laptops that you find today come with a “dual-core” processor, but this processer should meet the needs of nearly every end user.

The hard drive on this machine is 250GB. For our money, this is plenty of hard drive space that will suit all of your needs. Remember, the hard drive space of a machine has nothing to do with the speed. It simply determines how much information that you can store on the machine. If you do word processing, PowerPoint, and all the other Office Apps, this size is sufficient. For the rest of us, who store endless movies and music, we always need to buy another external hard drive for our laptops. Thus, 250GB will satisfy all but the multimedia buffs, who are not satisfied with the storage capacity of any hard drive.

Now, when we look at the memory of this machine, we find the Acer AS5251 laptop with 3GB of DDR3 memory. Is this a compromise? Well, it’s a bit like the single core processor mentioned above. Most of the top selling laptops today come with 4GB of memory, but we could reasonably ask the question: Is this overkill? Again, the standard end-user can get by with 3GB of memory just fine. In fact, I know folks who still get by just fine with 1 or 2GB of memory in their machines and they are frequently running multimedia.

Finally, the clincher that this is a good buy is that it comes equipped with an HDMI port. An HDMI port is the best way to connect a laptop to LCD TV, which is a great way to show a room full of people your picture and movies.

To summarize this Acer Aspire5251 review, I would say that this system sacrifices little for all that it offers. You will have a laptop that performs above-average at a price that is not only affordable but downright inexpensive.

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