When it comes to computers, "budget" often means "retro." Many low-cost laptops have the old-school 15.6-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio screens that their more upscale cousins have abandoned. By contrast, the Acer Aspire Go 15 ($599.99 as tested) has a 15.3-inch panel with an up-to-date 16:10 ratio and components not too far behind the times. The Aspire Go makes some compromises to meet its price, which we've seen for as low as $399.99 on sale during this review. While not quite an Editors' Choice award winner, the Aspire Go 15 surpasses our current go-to budget laptop pick, the Acer Aspire 3 (A315-24P), with faster processing and longer battery life.

Configurations and Design: From Mild to (Slightly) Wild 

A new spin on Acer's economy laptop line, the Aspire Go 15 is available in both Intel and AMD flavors across multiple models. It costs $229.99 for a Chromebook-like configuration with weak UFS flash storage, a weaker Intel N100 CPU, and the weakest Windows 11 Home version: S Mode.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The $599.99 Best Buy unit (model AG15-51P-510U) I've reviewed is much more capable. It has a real Windows 11 Home install, an Intel Core i5-1334U processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 15.3-inch IPS non-touch display with a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution. Only the petite 256GB (rather than 512GB) solid-state drive is a disappointment, which was overshadowed by Best Buy's $399.99 sale during our review—a genuine steal.

Granted, your first impressions of the Aspire Go may not be ecstatic: Its build is all smooth plastic instead of cool metal, its keyboard is not backlit, and its desktop is filled with junkware games like Elvenar, Forge of Empires, and Amazing Slots. Still, the Steel Gray chassis is handsome enough, measuring 0.78 by 13.6 by 9.6 inches and weighing a reasonably portable 3.75 pounds.

Acer's screen bezels aren't particularly thin, and the screen warps quite a bit if you grasp its corners, though you won't feel too much flex if you press the keyboard deck. The webcam has no privacy shutter, and you'll find neither face recognition nor a fingerprint reader to avoid typing passwords with Windows Hello.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The laptop's left flank holds two USB 3.2 Type-C ports suitable for the AC adapter, one USB 3.2 Type-A connection, and an HDMI port for an external monitor. A second USB-A port joins a 3.5mm headphone jack and a Kensington lock slot on the right side. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax, not 6E or 7) and Bluetooth radios come standard.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Using the Acer Aspire Go 15: Somewhere Between Economy and Business Class 

Thankful for small favors, I can report the webcam records in 1080p instead of lowball 720p resolution. However, it doesn't support Windows' recent AI-based Studio Effects like background blur and auto framing. It captures reasonably well-lit and colorful images but has noticeably soft focus—you couldn't tell I hadn't shaved—and is somewhat noisy.

Speaking of noise, Acer's PurifiedVoice utility reduces ambient sounds and lets you focus the microphone on either your voice or everyone around a conference table. On a related note, the AcerSense app centralizes system updates, hardware diagnostics, and miscellaneous tools ranging from wallpaper and sticker generators to an AI chatbot called Acer Assist that draws on your stored documents.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The screen would benefit from just a bit more brightness—I find myself tapping the F6 key in hopes of turning it up one or two notches—but it has wide viewing angles and decent contrast. The colors are a little underwhelming, clear but not rich or vividly saturated, and its fine details are crisp with no pixelation around the edges of letters. White backgrounds come through cleanly instead of dingy on the panel.

Speakers under the front corners produce sound with a hint of static at their not-so-high top volume; you can make out overlapping tracks, but you'll hear some harshness or echo. As with most laptops, you'll hear no bass to speak of.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Aspire's keyboard commits the all-too-common, all-too-infuriating sin of arranging the cursor arrow keys in a clumsy row instead of inverted T, with hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right. Instead of teaming the Fn and arrow keys for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down, you must press those keys (with Num Lock off) on the small numeric keypad at the right.

I can manage a brisk typing speed with few errors, but this keyboard isn't comfortable—it's incredibly shallow, with keys that have almost no movement at all. The midsize, buttonless touchpad is more successful, with decent precision and a not-too-hard, if hollow, click.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Testing the Acer Aspire Go 15: Participation Trophy Winner 

Looking for systems to challenge the Acer in our performance comparison charts, I found two low-cost Lenovos: The IdeaPad Slim 3i 15 has the same $599.99 price tag, albeit at Costco instead of Best Buy, while the AMD-powered Lenovo Yoga 7 16 Gen 9 convertible rang up at $799.99. The Dell Inspiron 15 and the Asus Vivobook Go 15 are two other thrifty AMD laptops.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests 

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with various automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Aspire Go took a bunch of silver and bronze medals, easily beating the rock-bottom-priced Dell and Asus and showing off its productivity chops in PCMark and Photoshop. It's no high-powered workstation but isn't sluggish or balky in moderate multitasking. Expect to draw reliable pep out of this system, but substantial projects might be out of reach.

Graphics Tests 

We challenge laptops' graphics with a handful of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The Steel Nomad Light subtest focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Unfortunately, the Aspire Go failed to run both the regular Steel Nomad and the ray-tracing Solar Bay benchmarks.

These laptops' integrated graphics are blown away by the discrete GPUs of gaming rigs and workstations, so their after-hours pastimes involve casual gaming and video streaming rather than fast-twitch fragging. Again, the Acer was no barn-burner, but it spanked the cheap Inspiron and Vivobook. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and Windows software to measure a screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

We've been spoiled by laptop battery life over the last year or two; almost 14 hours now counts as merely average. The Aspire Go 15 will have no problem getting through a full day of work or school plus an evening of homework or Netflix, though videos won't dazzle you through its color-challenged display. Its brightness is halfway between the murky 250 nits of the cheapest notebooks and the 350-plus nits we like to see from IPS panels.