The Acer Aspire S7 Review:

As a brand ambassador for Microsoft's Windows Champions program, I was loaned an Acer Aspire S7 for the a year to explore Windows 8 and Microsoft Office 365. As the year winds down and it gets to be time to say goodbye to the equipment, I am feeling the burn because this laptop, and I am not joking even a tiny bit when I say this, has become an extension of the family. Particularly to my fourteen-year-old son who has become so attached to the Acer that he has implored me buy it from the program and has taken it upon himself to write a review of the laptop for you.

The Acer is an amazing computer, I use it for gaming. The games I play on the Acer are on Steam (a free app which you can buy and play games on or play free games) and Minecraft. Minecraft doesn't need a great computer to play it on, but Steam games are in need of a good, fast computer.

The game I most commonly play is called Team Fortress 2 (free to play on Steam) and on this computer it's the best experience I've ever had playing this game. On my mom's older computer (about 10 times bigger, but from 2006-ish) it was slow, with bad graphics, and every Steam game was close to impossible to play.

The Acer laptop physically is also amazing—its super thin and easy to stow away in a bag or some other case.

So, if you're a gamer like me, then get this computer—it won't let you down in a video game.

~Theo

I will concur with my son that the Acer S7 is a great laptop. Not only is it crazy thin, very pretty (with its aluminum and Gorilla Glass-encased white body), and lightweight (2.86 lbs!), it has a lot more processing power than I expected out of an ultrabook.

And my son wasn't kidding around when he said that playing TF2 on the Acer was the best experience he'd ever had with the game. Before we got the Acer, I called Steam the "computer killer" because it wreaked havoc on every desktop and laptop in our house, crashing constantly and making me yell at Theo that he was going to destroy my computer in his quest to play "Garry's Mod" (another gem that can be found on Steam).

The only limitation that we've experienced with the laptop is that the SSD hard drive is only 128 gigabytes, which gets eaten up pretty quickly between Windows, Office, and Steam's game info (my son's game files take up over 20GB of space).

One great thing that has come from having to keep an eye on file sizes is that I have integrated Skydrive into my workflow during the past year and have become a huge fan of the service. I now use Skydrive to coordinate files across ALL my devices and computers—at home and work. In addition to uploading any individual files I am working on and might want to access from my husband's PC, my iMac at work, or my iPhone, it works in conjunction with Office 365 (all the latest MS Office programs on 5 family computers for $99.99/year) so you can save automatically to Skydrive instead of your hard drive.

All in all, even though I'm still not using OneNote like a pro (a goal I had set for myself because I'm always looking for new ways to get organized, especially if they allow creativity ), I found my year with Microsoft to be exceptional in helping me streamline and sync up my Mac and PC lives.