So I got this laptop four years ago and it is now slowly going into retirement as it has been replaced with a new (and more shiny) macbook pro, but it still gets used fairly often as a mid-spec gaming rig because of the stupid amount of power that it punches out! I'll go through some of the features that it has and then look at some of the good and bad things that have happened to it over the years of (ab)use that its had.

--Hardware Spec--
2Ghz Core 2 Duo T7300
-At the time of its launch this was a fairly good processor to have, the 2x2 combo was always one that I had wanted to get in a laptop and it works really well in this situation

512MB NVidea 8600M Graphics Card
This is what really makes it shine as a laptop - the graphics card has a really powerful punch behind it, making the laptop capable of playing pretty much most games that I can throw at it (L4D1&2, TF2 etc.)

2GB RAM
Again, at the time this was pretty standard amount of RAM to get, nowadays you would expect around 4GB, but its easily upgradable

250GB Hard Drive
Same as above - pretty standard at the time but now you would want to get something about 500GB-1TB minimum

14.8V 4800mAh Battery
When I first got the laptop the battery could top out at 6 hours (if you knew what you were doing) but nowadays it just sits attached to the power cable as the battery only lasts about 1 hour

Overall Specs
All of the different components work really well together, and according to the 'Windows 7 Computer Performance' it gets a base score of 4.5/7.9 with all of its base components and a max score of 5.2 - a pretty decent score for a laptop that is 4 years old.

--Physical Design--
This laptop is lovely to look at, the black front looks like the acer logo is just hovering in it, making it gorgeous to look at. The lid is open by what I can only describe as a 'car handle' that you pull on to open up the case. Built into this handle on the other side is a webcam, another nice addition to the package, making things like skype really easy.

The keyboard has a really nice feel to it, on mine all of the buttons still work and none of the lights have stopped working that tell me what everything is doing. On the left hand side of the keyboard is a touch sensitive control pad for your music, all with a lovely blue light illuminating them, so its really easy to play, pause tracks. On the other side of the keyboard are shortcut buttons for the wireless, internet browser, mail program and bluetooth - all of which are accompanied by onscreen messages when they are pressed.

Above they keyboard is one of my favourite parts - the soundbar! So instead of getting a left and right speaker - there is just one bar with a fair amount of directional speakers underneath it, this gives a nice impression of surround sound (there is also a subwoofer on the bottom for another added oomph!)

--Available Ports--
Acer really went all out when they put ports on the side of this thing - theres a fair amount kicking about...

USB2 Ports - 4
This is a great number of USB ports, your never going to run out - although one of them is right beside the DVD drive so if you put something in it the drive wont open

VGA Port & HDMI Port
This is what you would use to connect up to another monitor or a TV...both are good in their own way, but HDMI is now the new media standard

Firewire
You probably wont use this one but its for data transfer between older hard-drives, cameras etc.

Combined media card Slot
Great for taking your card out of a camera and just firing it in.

Ethernet
Its a gigabit port, which means if you need to hardware into a network it should work pretty well.

--Inside the Case--
So this is where it gets really techie (sorry!). As you would expect, a laptop that has this much power, inside the case is a bit cramped, the hard drive is quite tightly put in the corner, but there is a plastic strap to pull it out. The RAM is VERY close to the wireless card - so be careful if you ever want to remove this. Processor is covered by its heatsink leading to a fan in the back corner - this is the most problematic part, as the fan will get clogged and this can cause big issues - I had a temp sensor on the processor and it gets up to 94C regularly now as the fan just cant cope any more.

--Overall--
I havent tried to focus on the OS that you get with this laptop, as it is the one thing that you are most likely to change, I've had this one on Win XP, Vista, 7, ubuntu and a fair few other linux distros over the time and it manages to cope will with all of them. The laptop is really well built together and as a whole a solid piece of kit. It has lasted me a good 4 years of service with no real problems at all and there is virtually nothing wrong with it. The only bad points that do exist are the USB port that stops you using the DVD drive and the amount of heat that the thing can produce.