Aspire S7 - Ultrabook

The slim, premium-feeling Acer Aspire S7 was one of the very first Windows 8 laptops I spent a significant amount of time with in the weeks before the official release of Windows 8. My colleagues and I agreed at the time that this 13-inch touch-screen laptop was an excellent advertisement for Microsoft's new OS, but our demo unit was preproduction hardware, and not ready for benchmark tests. Now, with a final consumer-ready version of the same machine in-hand, we can report performance and battery life test results and give this excellent laptop a review score.

In hands-on use, this Aspire S7 looked and felt identical to the preproduction sample from October 2012. Like many of the laptops and convertible laptop/tablet hybrids we've reviewed recently, the Aspire S7 is a new-from-the-ground-up ultrabook, rather than an existing Windows 7 product updated with new software. The S7 is also one of the thinnest, slickest-looking ultrabooks I've seen, highlighted by a white minimalist chassis and a lid covered with Gorilla Glass (much like the HP Envy Spectre). Inside is an Intel Core i7 CPU and something that has already become almost commonplace in Windows 8 laptops: a touch screen, built into a 13.3-inch 1,920x1,080-pixel display.