some reviews said vostro with 8th gen... good battery life..
had acers in the past... latest one is aspire s7.... not good battery life... wifi still difficult to connect

so acer getting better now?
worried about acer battery life, wifi connection issues (despite driver updated to latest one)

my current laptops
- HP Envy 13 (2 yrs old)
- Acer Aspire S7 (5 yrs old)
- MBA 13 (5 yrs old)

all i5 with 4GB RAM and SSD
currently need 8GB RAM for applications (office and stats application)

prefer not to get 15.6 inch laptop as it is not portable and heavy

Planning to replace HP Envy 13.... current price of HP Envy 13 is too expensive. (bought ENVY 13 at rm2799)

any advice?

Long battery life? Not quite, just OK-good. E15 has reliability problem from what I know, no internal design change for years. Also the DVD drive sacrifices battery life and cooling, add noise too under load. Aspire 5 is better, I have a review to those who're interested.

Yeah they have QC issues for a long time but this depends on luck. Nevertheless Aspire 5 is still one of the best budget laptops, other models at the same price range all have mediocre build quality.

MSI GS65 is good coz slim & 8 hours battery...

Unfortunately, no recommendation below RM2.4k
NVM, I will keep on looking.

Is Aspire 5 = A515 model?
I think fellow ZMFong rated this laptop bad based on his review.

For budget laptops the 2 options above are the best, just need RAM+SSD upgrades. Acer Aspire 5 with i7 comes with IPS panel and included 128GB SSD while the i5 model gets TN panel without SSD. MX150 is far better than RX540 in terms of performance and efficiency especially in laptops.

Wait for CFL-H refresh. There's a Dell G7 7588

is this a good price for the laptop + SSD and RAM upgrade?