Acer Aspire R3-131T: dismal out-of-box performance

dis

I purchased the Acer Aspire R3-131T in haste. I went into the store to buy something else when I saw this and figured I'd had some good Acers in the past and I'd just go with the R3-131T instead. I completely regret that spur of the moment decision.

 

Everything I expect from a brand-new computer was lacking from the R3-131T. Boot ups are sluggish, the windows menu takes several seconds, loading simple applications and websites will freeze the entire system for a few seconds. The resulting effect is a very choppy user experience and lost productivity. It is what I might expect from the computer of a download-happy teenager who’s loaded it full of malware.

 

And as a general question, why is Acer producing laptops in the year 2016 with 32gb hard drives? My Acer netbook from 6 years ago has a 500gb hard drive, and to my disappointment seems to performs as well as this modern counterpart. It seems incredibly stingy.

 

The final slap in the face is that I bought in haste because I was moving to a city without access to electronics stores. I’m stuck with a machine that I would be embarrassed to try and resell.

padgett

It is a "loss leader" and designed to be sold at a low price. The performance matches. What is happening is that Acer is using common chassis and plugging in difference performance levels. Most R3s with the N3700 are upgradable but the one with the N3050 and 32GB SSD is not.

 

I have a R3-131T-P344 (last 4 are important) that has been hotrodded and can run with an i7. It is like a Camaro with a 4 cyl vs one with a V8. Both are pretty but the real difference is not always clear in the brochures.

SteveSi

I just bought one of these too which has a 500MB SATA WD Blue (low power) HDD and 2GB RAM.

It too is very sluggish. I changed the 2GB SO-DIMM memory card for a 4GB one which improved things a bit.

The HDD seems pretty slow. If I boot from a USB 3 SSD HDD to WindowsToGo instead of 100MB/s sequential read I get 500MB/s. This improves things quite a bit, so fitting a 7mm SSD would be a good upgrade (but you cannot do that on your 32GB model because that is flash memory, not a HDD).

The WiFi card is also really slow - they have obviously saved a few bucks there too.

To cap it all, the CPU is nearly always max'ed out which also doesn't help.

Overall, this is a nice chassis with really poor spec innards.

Also, the USB 3.0 port on my unit does not work properly - I have six different USB 3 HDD drives and four of them don't work or give data errors or hang when used on the R3. There seems to be a design issue with the USB 3 port on the R3!

padgett

It seems that not all R3s are created equal. Mine is a N3700 with 8GB Ram and a Samsung SSD. It runs "Windows Experience" with an i7 I was testing. Wifi about 30 feet and two walls from the router is running 39.6 Mbps down.

 

I did strip out a lot of the "bloatware" and am running Windows Defender and EMET 5.5 set "paranoid".

 

First thing to do when it is acting sluggish is to run Task Manager/Performance and see where the bottleneck is.