Acer Swift Go 14 AI (2024) Review After 6 Months of Use as a Music Producer
Hello everyone. Just wanted to share a very long, comprehensive review of using this laptop for the past 6 months, as an (amateur) music producer. I bought this laptop in December 2025. I use the SFG14-73T-94QB model version, which supports touch screen but without OLED display (just wanted to minimize the risk of burn in lol) for around 800 - 900 bucks on my local e-commerce (thanks to the big discount). It uses Ultra 9 185H, 32 gigs of RAM, and 1 TB SSD.
First of all, let me give a review from light workloads first. The machine is reliable for the past 6 months, even thought it used to have BSODs quite often during February (which already solved by turned off the Fast Startup setting). It can multitask dozens or up to 20 apps if you want to without any lag. I only noticed noticeably little lag/stutter if the RAM reaches 70% or more (which makes sense because it started to use pagefile to save the RAM). But performance wise, it holds up well during plugged in or without plugged in. Well... of course you will gain more performance by plugging it. You know how Windows laptops work 😃
When doing more demanding task like music production, it still runs smoothly without any crash or whatsoever. I primarily use Ableton Live, and mostly my workflow revolves in composition using MIDI and VST synths. I often use Pigments, Zebra, Vital, Hive, and Dune 3 as my to go synth(s). I don't use many 3rd party DSP plugins. The only time I would want to use them is Valhalla for reverb, Neutron for mixing, and some utilities like Youlean Loudness Meter to monitor the LUFS and something. My project always revolve around 8 until 15 tracks. I produce ambient, so I just need proper layerings with these amount of tracks which I think a good spot already. CPU meter used to be around 70-80 percent due to some unwanted bloatware and unnecessary service from Acer (which I will cover more of it later) but lately it just stays around 40-60% only when running multiple tracks with various plugins (including the stock ones from Ableton) during playback. I never experience crackle due to CPU overload. Scrubbing timeline, click, drag and drop has always been smooth without any problems so far. Also never freezing the tracks because the CPU workload is adequate already. My ambient project is more of a longform, around 8 until 10 minutes per track, so it takes time to export the audio. I never count the duration, but it's decent and not that long.
Now, for the bloatware and unwanted service, you might want to pay attention to McAfee and PxTpService. McAfee runs a lot of background services. I remember background services reduced from 110 or so to just 90 by removing McAfee. Use McAfee offical removal tool as you can't uninstall it directly from Windows. It reinstalls again anyway even thought you use 3rd app remover like (I use Uninstalr). RAM usage also decreased a lot, from 25% to just 19-20% during idle. This would smooth your system and decrease heat as antivirus like these only consume your CPU and RAM. For PxTpService, this is a service to ensure the function of media control feature goes well. You can just disable this if you never use it. I think this is essential because it takes around 4% or more of CPU usage. Another problem to heat and battery life (more of these later).
The laptop suffers from overheat when charging (80 to 90 celcius) and bad battery life (only around 4-5 hours) during the beginning. The culprits of battery life were McAfee, PxTpService, and some unnecessary Windows services. You might also want to disable AI or some of AcerSense feature that you seldom use. Ultra is quite an efficient chip actually, but it fails to enter deep sleep state because those things force the chip to enter higher state like C2 and could never go to C10 during light works. Once I removed McAfee and disabled those services, it has become more efficient, and manages to reach around 10 hours (or maybe more if your battery capacity is better than mine) of light use of browsing. Just be careful not to watch too much media because it shortens the battery quite a lot. For overheating, at some point I also use ThrottleStop to prevent heat, but I noticed that I just had to change the power plan to best power efficiency in settings and the CPU stays only around 50 celcius during charging. Other downsides are not-so-good speaker and rigid touchpad. If you prefer a good speaker with nice bouncy trackpad, this laptop might not be good for you.
I also tweaked the registry to disable some services like Windows update and such, but the steps are quite long and maybe you guys don't want to risk your system any further, so I will leave it at that. You can DM me if you're still curious about it. You can also ask me what are the services I have disabled to improve the system and battery life.
That's all about my honest review. Honestly, it might be much hassle for laymen to do all of these things because they just wanted their PC to work as it should be. But if you're a tech savvy and doesn't have a problem with tweaking your own system, you could snatch a high-performance chip just around 1K USD, or maybe cheaper if there's a big discount in your local market. I won't say that this laptop is the best, but I'm still satisfied until this day and look forward to use it everyday because of the good performance it brings. Ample RAM size and SSD are also a plus. Thanks for reading. Sorry if it becomes too long haha