Acer Aspire Vero: The Green Laptop For Work And Play

The Acer Aspire laptop series has been a brand favorite for a while, particularly the Aspire 5. While they scrimped on CPU and RAM, they could play simple games and had longer than average battery life, making them some of the more portable laptops to haul around long-term.

The Aspire Vero builds off the Aspire platform – a small but powerful laptop that can work or game, now with more RAM. It’s also made from recycled materials to be kinder to the environment if that’s your thing.

What You Can Do On This Laptop

Make no mistake, the Vero is squarely in the tier of affordable, ‘best-bang-for-your-buck’ laptops. It won’t run many games at high settings but with a setting tweak, you can easily get a mid-2010s game to 60 fps.

It can handle anything the internet will throw at it. Content and graphics-heavy sites work fine – iGaming is full of sites that host slots, table games, video poker, many with animated or even 3D components. Their games number in the hundreds, with there being 130 on the Vegas online casino alone, many free to play due to bonuses. Their games have lofty themes and animated graphics that can run on most laptops and indicate basic graphical competency, best seen with Fortunes of Olympus or Pulsar. The Vero can run their games without issue and then some.

The Specs

Let’s get to the good stuff – why it can do what it does. First, we’ll get basic specs out of the way. The Vero AV15-51 comes in two versions, the cheaper running an Intel Core i5-115G7 CPU, 512GB SSD storage, and 8GB of RAM. The more expensive variant has an i7-1195G7 chip, a 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM. The extra RAM is much appreciated after others in the Aspire series have fallen at that hurdle in the past, though RAM is more important for everyday stuff than gaming.

Speaking of each Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics card. It’s one of the more powerful GPUs out there for notebook laptops, which is a lot of qualifiers. You can find beefier gaming laptops that might sacrifice portability for playability but, if you want a notebook that can play games, the Xe is the industry standard.

It’s possible to get at the memory to make your own upgrades but this isn’t the kind of laptop you’d load with a lot of important stuff. It can work, it can play games to a reasonable extent, and it can handle whatever the internet throws at it. It’s a good laptop for obsessively opening a lot of study tabs too (thanks RAM!).

The Casing

The Vero has a 15.6-inch screen built into PCR plastics – that’s Post-Consumer Recycled if you didn’t know. Its casing isn’t as solid as metal but it gets the job done, particularly in the screen lid where stiffness and build quality matter. It’s unpainted, so can have a mottled look to it, but it’s still available in blue, grey, and green, obviously.

The webcam isn’t anything to write home about, you’re better off getting a mountable one if you want a camera. The native speakers are good, which is just as well when the casing has fewer ports than the previous year’s versions. It has two USB 3 ports on either side, an HDMI 2 output, a 3.5mm jack, a K-slot, and an AC adapter.

Overall, the Vero AV15 is an unusual but admirable choice for a notebook that can play basic games. It improves on previous Aspire iterations to shore up RAM, storage, and other shortcomings, though you really feel the case and the fact it isn’t made like other laptops.