Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is not a $800 laptop, people need to keep that in perspective. Yet for $379 it is a fabulous buy. After a day of playing with it, two things stand out, the keyboard and the screen quality. The layout of the keyboard is similar to that of a much more expensive laptop, with a full numerical pad on the right. The positioning of the touchpad offset to the left takes a bit getting used to, but makes sense when one realizes that the keypad is only occasionally used. The feel of the keys is good, although after a couple of years I'm not sure they would hold up well with a typist who pounds the keyboard hard (such as a non-touch typer). My expectations were the LCD would not have the most crisp picture, but so far the images are clear and bright. I have a two year old 20" Acer monitor, and the notebook has a better picture. A few misc. comments: -The wi-fi card seems faster than other devices I have on my home network. This is an anecdotal observation, not from a real through-put test. -The touchpad needs a lot of configuring. Out of the box it seems slow to react. Playing around alot with the controls help, but so far I have not set it to personal perfection yet. -The physical presence is quite attractive, but it has a pretty big footprint (due to the large keyboard). The specs say it weights about 5.8 lbs., which I have no reason not to believe, but it feels heavy. -Written documentation from Acer is bare bones, and there is no backup disk. -Connection ports on the sides of the notebook are too close to the front. If you were hooking up monitors (espcially to the HDMI port) and a bunch of USB devices the notebook would look like a rats nest. It would not interfere with typing, but ain't going to be pretty. There are no ports in the rear. -Case seems well built. The only part of the physical shell that looks weak is the plastic strip running across the bottom of the LCD. When I pulled off the protective clear tape, the strip separated from the LCD a bit. The plastic dropped back into place without a problem, but this part of the build is sub-standard -Hard drive does not appear to be the fastest one I've ever seen (using the testing program in Win 7), but is made by Hitachi, which gives me a level of comfort.