The Acer Swift 1 is our favourite budget laptop overall because, despite having just basic processing power, it’s a versatile model that will satisfy many kinds of users, and all for an excellent price.

Very few corners have been cut here. The 14-inch screen could be brighter and sharper, but it’s still pretty good. Backlit keys are a nice touch, as is the excellent fingerprint reader for fast unlocking of Windows. It even supports the latest wireless standard, WiFi 6. All this makes it a good fit for learners, students on campus and even small-business owners. The strongest traits of the Swift 1: great build quality, low weight (a mere 1.3 kg) and good battery life will serve all these users equally well.

We were especially impressed with the compact power brick and thin power cable of the Acer Swift 1, which were no trouble at all to lug around. We wondered why other laptops aren’t fitted this way.

It includes fast-charging capability which, Acer says, gives you four hours of work from a 30-minute charge. The Swift 1 is not perfect, of course. While the fanless Celeron processor saves your battery, it will struggle to edit any serious multimedia. Likewise, the basic 4 GB of RAM won’t handle too many simultaneous apps or dozens of browser windows. Luckily there’s a decent 250 GB SSD drive fitted, which dramatically improves all tasks, including your start-up time. The best part: We upgraded the Acer Swift 1 to Windows 11 and it ran beautifully!

Celeron CPU, 14″ FHD screen, 4GB RAM, 250 GB SSD, 1.3kg,  R7 000