According to Acer, the "E" in the Aspire E range stands for either "everyday" or "essentials". It's a budget laptop with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor at a very low price.

The E1-571 has an Intel Core i3-3110M processor running at 2.4GHz. Paired with 4GB of RAM, this processor completed our multimedia benchmarks with a respectable score of 41. This is almost double the score we've seen from some similarly-priced laptops such as the Acer Aspire V5-571 , with its previous-generation Sandy Bridge chip. It's also just a few points behind your average Ultrabook, making the E1-571 plenty fast enough to handle several applications at once, and its battery life of 6 hours and 42 minutes should keep you going for most of the day.

As we expected from such a cheap laptop, it's no good for games. The E1-571's Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset managed just 15.5fps in our Dirt Showdown test at 1,280x720 and the High quality preset, so graphically-intensive games are out of the question. However, you'll be fine with the casual games in the Windows 8 store.

While the E1-571 certainly performs well for a low-end laptop, we were disappointed by its connectivity options. The laptop has the standard VGA, HDMI and Ethernet ports, but all three of its USB ports are the old USB2 type as opposed to the newer and faster USB3, so you won’t be able to take advantage of super-fast external storage. Still, the E1-571 does come with a 500GB hard drive, a multi-format card reader and a DVD writer, so you're well set for on-board storage.

This is a budget laptop, and unfortunately it looks it. The whole laptop is made of cheap-feeling plastic, and its glossy black bezel and silver wrist rest pick up plenty of fingerprints, as does the laptop's lid. The keyboard is surrounded by hard matt black plastic, and the entire effect is about as far from a svelte Ultrabook as it's possible to be. It would be churlish to expect more for £350, though.