I bought this a year ago to cope with my college course. It is absolutely beautiful. The system does tend to get a bit hot at high system loads, but this is expected. I love the large screen and smooth performance. There is absolutely no issues when it comes to the hardware suffering ware and tear. The system drivers are a bit difficult to find for the wireless card when you install new Operating Systems. I have used Windows and Linux, but find that windows XP is unstable.

The battery has held up pretty well, but could be doing with replacement on it's third anniversary. Personally I find it high quality for the price paid, in all honesty I expected the laptop to be weak and break after a year. It comes quite a bit bloated with pointless tools such as for short keys etc. The only limitation I have found with this system is that the short keys such as for volume and brightness are not pre-set on alternate Operating Systems such as ubuntu.
In summary, 8/10 for the hardware, and 9/10 for durability.