Acer Aspire Go 15.6" NX.JJLAA.001 Silver

The Acer Aspire Go nails the basics with a great screen and surprisingly fast charging for a budget price. But the painfully small 128GB of storage and restrictive Windows S Mode are constant frustrations. Buy it only if you find it dirt cheap and your needs are extremely light.

The Intel N355 processor is the star here, and it's a solid step up from the old N-series chips. For everyday tasks like juggling browser tabs, firing up Netflix, or working in Office, it feels snappy and responsive. Boot times are quick too, which owners seem to love. But don't get any ideas about heavy lifting. The integrated Intel graphics are firmly middle-of-the-pack, and our database puts the overall CPU power in the bottom third of all laptops. That means photo editing, serious multitasking, or anything beyond casual use will make this machine sweat. The 8GB of RAM is a real bottleneck, and the 128GB UFS storage is not only tiny but also one of the slowest storage solutions we've tracked, landing in the bottom 10% of all laptops.

Stacked against the competition, the Aspire Go lives in a completely different universe. A Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x or an Apple MacBook Air will obliterate it in performance, battery life, build quality, and storage speed, but they also cost several times more. The real fight is with other budget Chromebooks and Windows laptops in the sub-$400 range. Here, the Acer's big, nice-looking screen and fast charging give it a leg up. But a competitor with a true 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM would be a smarter long-term buy, even if the processor is a bit slower. The non-upgradeable, slow storage is the Acer's Achilles' heel.

Value is where things get weird. The price range we're seeing across vendors is a wild $310 to $8195, which makes no sense. At the low end, around that $310 mark, this laptop is a steal for a student or a casual user who just needs a big screen for web stuff. But if you're seeing it priced anywhere near the middle or high end of that spread, run away. You can get a far more powerful and reliable machine with a proper SSD for the same money. If you can snag it for a true budget price, it's a fair deal. Just know you're buying a very basic tool.

The Acer Aspire Go is a budget laptop that knows exactly what it is, and mostly doesn't pretend to be anything else. You get a big 15.6-inch 1080p IPS screen, a new 8-core Intel N355 chip, and a sleek design for not a lot of cash. It's built for the basics: web browsing, streaming, and typing up documents, and it handles those without much fuss.

But the corners Acer cut to hit this price are pretty obvious. The 128GB of storage is painfully small and uses slower UFS memory instead of a proper SSD, and 8GB of RAM is the bare minimum for Windows these days. It ships in Windows 11 S Mode, which locks you into Microsoft Edge and the Microsoft Store, a restriction that seems to annoy just about everyone who buys one.

Anyone who needs to store more than a handful of apps and files should skip this. The 128GB of non-upgradeable storage is a deal-breaker for most people. If you plan to install real software, keep lots of photos, or do any kind of creative work, look for a laptop with at least a 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM, even if it costs a bit more.

The Acer Aspire Go is a single-task machine for a single type of person. If you need a cheap, big-screened laptop for writing, email, and streaming, and you can find it for a genuinely low price, it'll serve you well. Just be prepared to immediately switch it out of S Mode and live with the constant anxiety of a nearly full hard drive. It's a decent secondary computer or a first laptop for a younger student, but it's not built to be anyone's daily workhorse.