The Acer Nitro 5 series is perhaps the best general-purpose laptop money can buy – pending that saving money is your objective. I am not much of a techie but when I needed a dedicated windows PC, I had in mind what I needed, and it had to be something that was inexpensive yet built for dedicated processing and upgrade/repairable because I need it to last. I bought this laptop about two years ago and after using it for so long, this has been the most serendipitous purchase I have experienced in a while. The Acer Nitro 5 is a series of gaming laptops offered in a variety of configurations that varies its graphics card chipset, RAM, and main storage. In my case, I went for the Acer Nitro 5 AN515-51 model which came with a GTX 1050 GPU, 8GB RAM, and 1TB HDD. I will leave it to other reviewers on Amazon and YouTube to tell you about how it plays games because for my purposes, this laptop is overkill. Even at this simple configuration, it can readily handle the most common tasks of an average computer user – from word processing to non-competitive gaming, the hardware can handle it. Speaking of hardware, the Input/output choices are exceptional, featuring both USB-A and one USB-C port with wired ethernet so right out of the box it’s ready to work with almost everything you have without using a dongle. If you can disregard your preconceptions of what a ‘gaming’ laptop and instead look at this as an intermediate-level computer with an emphasis on speed and processing power, the Nitro 5 series is a major step above computers intended for office use.I am primarily a productivity user and both CPU and GPU have come in great in encoding and decoding files, which is about the only way I can get the fans to be audible. Really, under light usage this laptop is quiet. A backlit keyboard was never a consideration but having worked late into the night, I have come to appreciate just how the red backlights do not interfere with my natural night vision but there is a bit a caveat about its operation. Expectedly, there are power-saving features when this laptop is on battery and one of those is that the backlights will turn themselves off after 30 seconds of inactivity and there is nothing you can do about it. Battery wise, I have averaged about 4 hours with light usage with an average time of 2 hours to fully recharge it. The built-in touchpad quality is poor – or else I have yet to get used to it. I have had incredible experiences with the Cirque touchpad and drivers and the control are impeccable – the Nitro 5’s touchpad is plasticky and the ‘buttons’ are built-in to the lower part and uses the flex to its advantage. Finally, Bluetooth and USB 3.0 interference are pretty bad. I am not sure if it is my individual laptop [because apparently it is a problem with any computer with both wireless options], but my wireless mouse movement becomes erratic to the point it is unusable. Using the transceiver in the USB 2.0 ports does correct the problem though.If you have done the search for YouTube, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the numbers and personalities rating the Nitro 5 but take my word on this – the consensus is that this a good computer for the money. So if the scores and benchmarks mean nothing to you, the Acer Nitro 5 is an inexpensive entry into performance computers without having to eat top ramen longer than anyone should.