This was my first laptop at the age of 15. It was an improvement on my original computer, however the Acer Aspire 5315 is by no means spectacular.

I would not class the appearance of the laptop as spectacular, although better in the case of its durability. The clips which shut the laptop were fragile and these broke for me after around three months. However, it has survived being dropped onto concrete on more than one occasion, so it's no soft touch.

Onto the actual performance. When originally installed, the laptop worked well, and was efficient. However, I experienced an endless amount of problems:

1] Despite cleaning it often, the fan could not appear to stand frequent use and consequently resulted in the overheating of the system, which caused me a great deal of distress.

2] Upon original installation, there are many needless Acer programs that are present which I found difficult to remove. This proved irritating, and was also the case with other programs on my PC that I wanted to remove - it would not completely uninstall certain programs, such as a NTO CD/DVD burner that I had no need for.

3] After a long time of ownership, the sound that emits from the laptop seems irregularly loud - almost in the form of an industrial-sized machine - and early in the morning, turning this on woke my parents up earlier than they would have wished. Considering they were in a different room with the doors shut, that just goes to show the problems it caused. There was no way to really solve this problem either.

In spite of the above, I found that it served me well as a school student. It was not completely reliable, although I could complete work for the most part while not fighting against the system with "this program is not responding" errors, although the laptop is not completely suited to computer games in my experience so if this is your thing, you may wish to consider a different product. If you're looking for a laptop for work, to surf the internet - normal things, but nothing major - then it will actually suit you down to the ground, providing you do not overuse it. If you're looking for something a bit more specialised, there's obviously products of much better quality on the market.