What a hardcore laptop! I used this as a main computer and laptop for over 5 years and gave it a fair share of abuse.

During this time I heard of horror stories of Acer laptops breaking very easy and for complete breakdowns to occur. I never experienced anything as bad as this until about 4 years.

When released this laptop was a very high spec and would easily handle most high end games. Of course this isn't true today and in pure specification terms you will find a similarly powerful laptop in a Netbook.

With such a small amount of RAM (upgradable) I wouldn't recommend using this laptop for any new games in the past few years. In fact my particular model wasn't happy streaming videos over the net in fullscreen.

If you are interested in a second hand, basic laptop then this may be what you need. With Windows XP or a Linux OS the laptop should run perfectly fine and allow you to browse the internet, email and produce documents easily.

Overall the laptop is very large and quite heavy. Add the power brick and the whole package is uncomfortable to carry around. I don't believe this was designed as a laptop to travel with but it is possible and I've taken this on many train journeys.

I found that most of the other features and specifications work as you would expect with WiFi, DVD writer, etc. There isn't any Bluetooth on this laptop but plenty of USB ports (at the back).

Acer pre-load the laptop with the ability to re-install the computer to it's initial state without any CDs. You can get rid of this and free up some storage space but it's handy for uses who might want to do this later down the line.

After around 4 years of using the laptop (along with dropping, banging and carrying it around lots) it gave a sign that it's life was coming to an end. During a long haul flight the laptop developed serious issues with the graphics card with it being unable to load in anything but Safe Mode. With a lot of tweaking it was possible to get it working albeit it with some graphic defects - however this was a major malfunction. I'm unaware whether this is a common defect and it definitely got a bashing through the years but may be a consideration if buying second hand.