acerSwift Go 14 SFG14-41 Laptop - AMD Ryzen 5 7530U, 8GB, 512GB SSD, Integrated Graphics, 14-inch FHD IPS, Windows 11 , Silver

I've been working in the technology field for many years, and any laptop around £600 is going to have some compromises. We got two for our daughters, who needed something reasonable for school.We opted for the base model 8Gb Ryzen 5 with internal graphics, plenty of oomph for the money and its intended use - the lower power requirement means the battery has 11 hours of charge, and so far, they are coming home with a few hours left in it every day. This is not a games machine; it could run older titles (c2015) well enough; it is suited more to Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and general browsing.Where this laptop stands out is the genuine premium feel of it without sacrificing too much. It is slim and light with a rigid all-aluminium case - this is very unusual at this price. It has dual fans which will keep it cool. The keys are backlit, and the screen is a high-quality OLED at 16:10 aspect with excellent contrast and colours. It looks premium and has the build quality to match.Opening the laptop creates a slight tilt to the keyboard deck which is excellent for comfort. The trackpad is good, a little small, but they did squeeze a big keyboard onto the deck with a fingerprint sensor on the power button. I would say the keyboard is not something that would enable high-speed touch typing, as it has a shallow travel (I use a mechanical keyboard at home) but the keyboard is one of the biggest for a 14'' laptop, and I managed 60 words a minute.The speakers are not bad, but this is a laptop, not a sound system; there is a headphone jack. There are plenty of connections, including two fast USB-Cs (screen and charging), HDMI, and USB-B. It comes with 11g wifi (wifi 6), absolutely trouble-free and fast, and my daughter's Bluetooth headphones worked without any fuss.Previously, they had a Lenovo (bits fell off after two years, and the keyboard broke) and an MSI Modern 14, which managed to brick itself - again, just two years old. I know Acer laptops well, and this one is based on the admired Swift chassis as an evolution, not a revolution.Acer laptops tend to last well; getting five years of daily use out of one is a given, and this model improves on the older Swift models, which was an excellent laptop. The Swift Go is getting excellent reviews in the press, and for the money, you would be hard-pushed to beat it at the moment (Nov 23).

I have no hesitation in recommending this laptop. I am not a power user but this laptop does everything I want.I'd prefer the DEL key to be at the bottom right of the keyboard and I'll need to become accustomed to the illuminated white letters on the silver grey keyboard. UPDATE: I now find just one button, F11, turns the keyboard illumination on / off so the keys change to a visible dark colour. It's clever.But the good points far outweigh these items. The speed, lightness, connectivity, wi-fi and set up have all been impressive. So far the battery has been good but it's early days (2 days only). Otherwise I'd give it 5 stars. Maybe more premium laptops are have more Pros but this was my price point. UPDATE: battery good for my purposes, so I think it's worth 5 stars.

As always, my research into any purchase took several weeks. This was the laptop which suited my requirements more accurately. I am a great follower of AMD processors, so this was a "deal-breaker". I have a Ryzen in my desktop too because they are so configurable. The large capacity Solid State Drive also makes this laptop future Proof (I'm sure that I will not run out of disk space for the foreseeable future. 16GB of ram ensures that the speed won't be slowed down by buffer "bottlenecks", which should be plenty for all but the most intensive tasks. Windows 11 was fairly easy to grasp, being quite similar to Windows 10 (which I have used for many years).I tried an Acer Swift Go in a local Currys store, which I really liked. The only differences were that it was an Intel version (A deal Breaker), and it had a Touch Screen. The version bought from Amazon does NOT have a Touch Screen, which would have been nice, but certainly not essential. I'm still not sure why some Acer Swift Go have a touch screen, & others do not. Perhaps someone can inform me in the comments below.I noticed over many months that the battery life was nowhere near what they were advertising, so I looked into this anomoly. It turned out that, even after the machine was switched off after each session, part of it was still on standby/hybernation. A quick Google search & a tweek of the settings turned the "Fast Start" option off. It now takes a few more seconds to boot up, but the battery lasts twice as long as it did before - just something to keep an eye on!The screen is good quality & the sound is powerful, which should be expected anyway. The number of USB ports (both A Type & C Type) are really handy, and it means I can keep my wireless mouse sender/receiver plugged in all the time.All in all, this is a great laptop, with many features which are both useful and essential in todays modern tech apreciative people. I love all the features & highly recommend this PC.

Lovely laptop by Acer. Very quick to start, easy to set up and nice big SSD storage. Battery only lasts about 10 hours, but quick to recharge! Very pleased with it! JD

Nice size and weight and performs well for the price. My only criticisms are to do with the windows operating system ( windows 11 ) of which I am not a fan but it isn’t fair to criticise the laptop for that but I do like the speed it starts up and I like the included fingerprint security sensor and once you have got the hang of windows even that isn’t too bad :-)

This laptop is fast, reliable and lightweight. I recently had an accident and I couldn't carry a heavy laptop on my back for college so my partner found this one. I absolutely love it and would recommend it to everyone.

Recommend

This little laptop is very good value – it arrived quickly and works perfectly