Sometimes inexpensive hardware comes with excessive drawbacks
Buying a notebook for a person who isn’t good at looking after their hardware is problematic, and as a father I’ve made those choices. You can either spend an outrageous amount on something designed to withstand cluster-bomb attack or go with something cheap, cheerful and ultimately disposable.
The Extensa EX2508 is certainly in the latter category, being less than £280 for the C3QZ variant Acer provided.
The positioning is decidedly entry level, but I still can’t help but be slightly amazed by what you can get for that money in terms of features and functionality.
The computing focal point here is the Celeron N2840, a dual-core Bay Trail-M processor that runs at 2.16GHz (2.58GHz Turbo) and has a modest TDP of just 7.5 watts.
On this rig it’s connected to a healthy 8GB of DDR3L and a 1TB hard drive, so it’s given a modest chance to impress from the outset.
Visuals come courtesy of a 15.6" LED backlit display with a natural resolution of 1366 x 768. This is the part that probably shows the tight fiscal constraint under which the Extensa has been made, because the viewing angles aren’t good, and flat colours appear to have a curious screen grain visible on them. The screen isn’t the worst I’ve seen by a long way, but it’s nothing worth writing home about – or on, for that matter.
In terms of other features, it’s an odd combination of the good, bad and decidedly ugly. At the positive end of the spectrum I’d put the inclusion of a SuperMulti DVD drive, Bluetooth, a single USB 3.0 port along with two USB 3.0 ones, a full-size keyboard with numeric pad and an SD card reader.
Less wonderful is a LAN port that doesn’t support gigabit speeds, only ‘n’ class wi-fi, and a VGA resolution webcam.
But probably my biggest complaint here is where Acer chose to place almost all the ports, along the hinged edge – a location where port damage is almost inevitable.
I also explored the upgrade possibilities and effectively concluded there are none, because the machine doesn’t have an access panel, and getting inside involves a major dismantling exercise that even this writer passed on attempting.
Where cheap notebooks usually take a real kicking, though, is in terms of the battery life, but the Extensa is actually quite respectable there. Acer claims six to seven hours with some battery management (turning down the screen brightness, etc.), and my tests suggested that these weren’t too optimistic. Even with moderately heavy use, you should be able to get five hours or longer if you’re just watching videos or listening to music.
The software side of this equation is also something of a mixed bag. As a promotion, Acer is currently providing a year-long subscription to McAfee LiveSafe supposedly worth £59.99. Frankly, I would have easily paid an extra fiver not to have anything from that software vender pre-installed on my PC.
Undoubtedly a better deal is the pre-installation of Windows 8.1 with Bing that should be upgradable to Windows 10 for free soon.
Regrettably, Acer decided that beyond the OS it would unleash the demonic hounds of crapware on the poor Extensa, so I’d allocate at least two or three hours to removing the 30 or more items of dubious value it's recklessly pre-installed. Then you'll need another five hours to install the hundreds of updates that Windows 8.1 needs to become current. The halcyon days where you could just buy something and start using it immediately are a thing of the past, apparently.
Looking past the crapware, chiclet keyboard and badly placed external ports, this is a serviceable machine that can handle general light office duties, surfing and YouTube playback. At least it can be, once you’ve uninstalled anything that sucks overall performance through numerous uncontrolled background tasks.
That’s the critical factor on this machine, because it’s living on the cusp of usability, and without some constraint being exercised by its owner, the chasm of progressive sluggishness beckons.
It managed a score of just 1211 in the PCMark 8 Home 3.0 Accelerated test, about a half of what you’d expect from a low-end office PC. Therefore, there isn’t much, if any, gaming potential beyond Angry Birds level graphics, even if the GPU seems workmanlike. There just isn’t enough CPU power to render 3D titles at playable framerates using the natural screen resolution. For that, you really need to spend a little more and have at minimum a Core i3 under the hood.
And that’s the rub here, because while it might offer great value for money initially, it also likely that for many users will discover its limitations all too quickly. Therefore, it’s probably only ideal for a very occasional user. Mark Pickavance
An underpowered notebook that’s strongest feature is the price.