Out of Pod Experience

Not a bad choice for $350. Though being several years newer, the Acer has some advantages, and a few deficiencies, mostly with regards to the HDD.

Acer vis-a-vis the T410

CPU

• The i5 5200U CPU (2.2GHz) is a little slower than the 540M (2.53GHz), +1 Lenovo
• 5200U consumes 57% less power than than 540M, = longer battery life +1 Acer
• 5200U is 5 years newer, smaller architecture, able to read more instructions, +1 Acer
• same number of threads, cache, etc., wash between Acer and Lenovo CPUs

RAM

• maximum 16GB on the Acer vs 8GB max on the Lenovo, +2 Acer
• 5200U supports DDR3L-1333 and 1600, vs DDR3-800 and 1066 for the 540M, +2 Acer
• both come with 4GB RAM, but the RAM in the Acer is faster with better bandwidth, +1 Acer

Screen

• 15.6" for the Acer, vs 14.1" for the T410. +1 Acer

Graphics

• The Intel HD 5500 in the Acer gets an average score of 6873.9 in 3DMark 06, vs 1467.4 for the Nvidia NVS 140 in the Lenovo. Not even in the same league remotely. +5 Acer

HDD

• The Acer comes with a 5400RPM 500GB HDD. 5400RPM is slow and cumbersome by any measure, but relatively standard on mainstream laptop offerings. For an HDD, you'll eventually want to replace it with at least a 7200RPM HDD or an SSD, -5 Acer. The HDD is the weakest link in the Acer and will represent the largest bottleneck in its general performance.

Advice if you buy the Acer and do an upgrade right away:
1. Buy a 7200RPM WD Black 16MB cache 750GB HDD from NewEgg, $55 with promo code:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236561
2. Get/burn a copy of Windows 8.1
3. Remove stock 500GB 5400RPM HDD from Acer, replace with WD HDD
4. Re-install Win 8.1, re-use CD-KEY on the Windows sticker on the bottom of laptop, which is legit to do as you're already licensed.

Of course, replacing the stock HDD with a faster HDD or an SSD can be done at some point in the future when you can afford it or want more oomph, three, six, or twelve months from now.

External hard drives are fine for storage. If you eventually replace the 5400RPM HDD with a 7200RPM HDD or SSD, you'll want to replace it with an internal drive.

Of course, you can always, at some point in the future:
1) back up an image of your 5400RPM laptop HDD
2) to any external HDD large enough, and
3) re-image from the external HDD to any new internal 7200RPM HDD or SSD
4) keeping OS, program installations, files, and settings all intact

If you wait a year or so to replce the 5400RPM HDD, 500+ GB SSDs ought to be very affordable.

Not sure how tech-savvy you are, but:
1) an HDD is a hard disk drive with spinning magnetic platters and a spindle that reads the 0s and 1s. Similar mechanism as digital CD/DVDs and the analog needles that produce music from a phonograph, except instead of using lasers or needles to read information from grooves, it's magnetic. Typical max read/write speed is 120 megabytes per second for a 7200RPM drive
2) an SSD is a hard drive that utilizes flash memory. No moving parts. Has firmware that evens out wear on the modules to balance out what would otherwise be the extremely negative impact of volatility of flash memory. Read/write speeds often exceed 500 megabytes per second.
3) your 5400RPM HDD will see 80 to 100 megabytes per second in read/write

and

4) If you're a graduating high-schooler, you'll get laughed off any college campus for wearing your high school class ring.
5) never use power-saving mode unless you're disconnected from a wall socket and actually need to conserve battery life

Cloning the hard drive is relatively easy. Just have your tech-savvy brother, at a later date, mount both the removed 5400RPM laptop drive and the newer 7200RPM or SSD in his desktop, and use a cloning program on his OS drive to copy the data from the old hard drive to the new one. Might take an hour or two.

Physically removing the hard drives in the laptop and replacing it with the new one will only take a minute each way, while his desktop can act as middleman in the cloning process.

AFAIK the Blade Runner is the Mr. Pistorius, who walked on his stumps over to the bathroom door, shot his girlfriend, he thought she was an intruder.

But no, definitely watch Blade Runner if you haven't seen it. Without the narration Ridley Scott forced Harrison Ford to do, if possible.