When I’m greening Windows

Acer’s Aspire Vero laptop wears its eco credentials proudly, but is the performance good enough to back up the message?

from £649 / stuff.tv/vero

■ The Aspire Vero seems to be making more than a token effort to be green. Its plastics are 30% recycled (50% for the key caps), it’s designed to be easily taken apart so you can get it fixed rather than tossing it into the sea, and the eco-friendly packaging has won a Red Dot Award.

■ The Aspire Vero starts at £649 and that particular spec is a totally sound buy. It has a 512GB SSD, 8GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5. For £250 more you can upgrade that to a Core i7 with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, which is what we’re testing here. That’s a lot of laptop for under a grand.

■ The innards are good enough for just about any productivity job we could mention, including video editing – and while it’s not a gaming laptop, its abilities don’t seem all that different to a PS4. It doesn’t make a lot of noise under pressure either.

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On paper the 15.6in 1080p IPS screen is just what you’d expect, but colour reproduction is pretty poor: red app icons look more like pastel shades, and max brightness isn’t too impressive either.

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The backlit keys feel fast to type on, while the well-positioned plastic touchpad is a good size and does a great impersonation of a textured glass one… but the less said about the unreliable inlaid fingerprint reader the better.

Tech specs

Screen 15.6in 1920x1080 IPS LCD Processor Intel Core i5/i7 RAM 8/16GB Storage 512GB/1TB SSD Connectivity Wi-fi 6, Bluetooth 5, Ethernet, 3/4x USB, HDMI Battery life Up to 9.5hrs Dimensions 363x 239x17.9mm, 1.8kg

Green heaves The Vero weighs 1.8kg, so it’s not the most portable laptop out there, but it will fit into a rucksack without any problems.

■ Zen green mottles The Vero’s 30% recycled plastic chassis is paint-free. Its finish has a roughened texture of teeny-tiny embossed honeycomb shapes and a greeny-grey finish mottled with dots of grey and yellow.

■ Sprawly green giant With a zippy 5Gbps USB-C port alongside one or two USB 3.0s, a full-size HDMI and an Ethernet socket on the left, plus a single USB 2.0 port on the right, the Vero is likely to satisfy most connectivity needs.