A few months ago I bought a new laptop: the Acer ES1-111M-C3CP. I wanted something small and quiet. I didn’t need anything particularly powerful—that was the point: just something that would allow me to get on with some writing projects while Reuben. Joshua and Isaac hijack my desktop PC to play LEGO computer games.
Specification
The laptop features:
- Windows 8.1 64-bit
- Intel Celeron N2840 2.16 GHz
- Intel HD graphics
- 11.6″ HD LED display screen (1366 × 768 pixels)
- Fanless (silent performance)
- 8 GB DDR3 RAM (upgraded from 2 GB — there’s a guide here on how to upgrade the RAM: Acer Aspire E3-111 Disassembly)
- eMMC 32 GB (solid state disk)
Setting up the laptop
My plan was to install only a few applications:
- Google Chrome (browser)
- Dropbox (selective sync of only writing projects)
- Scrivener (writing application)
- Write! (a beautifully simple editor)
- LibreOffice (a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite)
- Scapple (free-form text
- Mindjet Mind Manager (mind mapping)
- MusicBee (audio player)
- VLC media player (for watching the occasional Mpeg-4)
- Skype (video and text chat)
- F-lux (adjust the screen colour temperature)
Out of the box, set-up didn’t take terribly long (once I’d swapped out the 2 GB RAM for an 8 GB module) and I signed into my Microsoft account
I then uninstalled most of the bundled applications (McAfee, Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student trial, a few Acer media/office applications, plus a bunch of Windows Modern UI (Metro) apps and set about the seemingly never-ending task of running Windows Update which pulled in more than 130 updates.
But here’s the thing… the laptop only started with 32 GB of hard disk space. On initial startup there is a little more than 9 GB of free space. After the Windows updates only 3.13 GB of hard drive space is left.
Windows updates ate almost 6 GB of hard drive space!?
And that’s after uninstalling the bundled software and running Disk Clean-up to remove remnant update files.
Experience
Over the last couple of months I appear to have performed a factory reset more often than actually using the laptop for the purpose for which I bought it.
The factory reset is pretty good, to be fair. The 32 GB drive is divided into three partitions:
- 100 MB (EPI system partition)
- 19.40 GB (NTFS—Windows 8.1)
- 9.5 GB (recovery partition)
Despite what the Acer factory reset application advises, once you’ve created a USB recovery disk you cannot delete the recovery partition. According to some on various discussion forums, this partition is a Windows Image File Boot (WIMBoot) that is required to run Windows.
Which means that if you find that you’ve installed too large a collection of applications you end up with your C: drive reporting 0 bytes free, as I did for the umteenth time last night.
To try to get around this I attached a tiny Sandisk 32 GB USB 3.0 drive as storage (installation files and music) and onto which I could install applications. But, of course, whenever you install any software on Windows, no matter where, the C: drive is always used.
And so I still managed to overflow the C: drive and had to perform yet another factory reset.
Currently my ambitions are a little less ambitious:
- Google Chrome (browser)
- Dropbox (Modern UI)
- Scrivener (writing application)
- Write! (a beautifully simple editor)
- F-lux (adjust the screen colour temperature)
I’ll see how I get on. With those five applications installed I have 2.63 GB free on C: drive. Far from the 9.5 GB that I had expected when I bought the machine.
Conclusion
I can’t help feeling rather disappointed with my first couple of months with this machine. The build quality is really pretty decent for something at this price (£179): the screen is large and bright enough for my needs, the keyboard feels comfortable, and so far I’ve had no issues with the touchpad (though I do prefer to use a USB Microsoft Intellimouse Optical mouse.
32 GB is clearly not enough. I would have happily paid more for double that. 64 GB would have made this gem of a machine far more flexible. Instead I have to worry about installing as little as possible. I can’t simply get on and write, I always have to have an eye on whether Windows Update has run and used up the remaining sliver of hard drive.
(UPDATE: Note that the hard drive cannot be upgraded. It’s an eMMC drive — like flash storage — that is soldered to the motherboard.)
Hey! There’s not even enough free space to keep the trial installation of Microsoft Office 2013 that it ships with—how utterly ill-thought through is that?!
If I’d been using this as a Windows-flavoured ChromeBook-equivalent, relying entirely on web apps and storage, I would probably be delighted with the machine. But as it is, I’m not writing everything in Google Drive and I’ve more or less given up on Microsoft OneDrive due its unreliable file synchronisation for documents. (Something that a friend of mine from St Andrews was also complaining about on Facebook the other day, prompting her move to Dropbox.)
Anyway, I’ll report back here in a couple of months to give an update on how I’m getting on… in the meantime, if you’re looking to buy this laptop yourself be warned that once you’ve done all the updates you’ll have next to no drive space to store anything, let alone run the thing.