Acer 15.6" Aspire Laptop 6GB 750GB | V5-573P-9899

The fan is extremely noisy. I don't even dare to bring it to the library and my office because of the noise. The touchpad is loose, you have to click hard. Also, the trackpad sometimes doesn't work accurately. Acer customer service is horrible. They only have one repair center in Texas, and they need me to send my laptop to them from PA without even covering the shipment cost. If you want to return it to the seller, it takes days to process. I wish I hadn't bought it.

Overall this is a nice laptop for the money. The screen is big and bright and I'm surprised at how well the touch screen works. It works nicely with Windows 8. Just upgraded to 8.1 with no issues.Some minor quibbles: it's a shame they put the Core i7 with the 5400 rpm hard drive. Clearly that's the limiting component. I was thinking that I would replace it with an SSD, but I've since read that on these models it is somewhat challenging (not impossible) to replace the drive. You might want to research that further if this is your plan. I was also somewhat disappointed with Acer's specs on this unit which claim that it has a VGA port, but it doesn't. I need to use a variety of projectors and some only have VGA. Minor workaround is to get an adapter, but they shouldn't claim VGA if it isn't there.I'm reasonably happy with the purchase considering the price point.Update one year later - wifi has become an issue. No change on our part, but won't connect reliably anymore and the speed is very low. I've read a bit that indicates there is a wire from the motherboard to the antenna in the screen that may break and it seems that may have happened to us. Works fine when connected to a wired LAN port. Rather than muck with the wire, I'm going to try an external USB wifi connection. Some others (not everyone) seem to have issues with wifi, so be warned about this unit.

Unit purchased in April, 2014. In the interest of full disclosure, until April of this year, I would have rated it 4 1/2 stars.The Good:G1 - no problems, whatsoever, with the laptop's ability to run, stand-alone, any app I've installed, including Office Pro.G2 - it came without a lot of proprietary "enhancements". There ARE parts of the OS that the Windows helpline guys won't touch, due to OEM customization.G3 - upgrade to Windows 8.1 was painless.G4. operator input mechanisms: touchscreen implementation is great. I love the freedom to move between the touch pad, keyboard, touchscreen, and mouse at will. I'll never go back.G5 - the display is VERY clear and sharp.The BadB1 - Poor design choice of OS. Laptop came, loaded with Windows 64-bit, which I thought would really be great because it would utilize the entire bus, etc Wrong. Researched the diff between Windows 32- and 64-bit, I learned that Windows DID NOT RECOMMEND USING THE 64-BIT OS. The OS is NOT optimized for 64-bit machines. It's optimized for huge databases. Why is that Acer's bad, rather than MicroSoft's? Acer should have gone with the recommended OS.B2 - Capabilities and upgrades for 64 always lag those for 32. Customer base is significantly smaller, so release dates and software functionality & reliability are lower priority.The Ugly.Ug1 - The display crapped out. On 21 April 2015, the display began to feature a 2-inch-plus band of solid black from top to bottom of the otherwise-beautiful display. ALL of the time. Apparent quality problem with connectors to the 2nd bank of LEDs.Ug2 - The keyboard sensitivity seems to be off. When using the keyboard, there seem to be almost-randomly-repeated characters when a key is struck only once. Could be that the sampling rate is too high.Ug3 - The plastic above one display hinge has a 2-inch crack from one edge of the display back to the other.Ug4 - Too (two) few horses under the hood (pun intended). The i7-4500U (whose "integrated" architecture is a dual-core CPU with a graphics chip mounted on the motherboard--no graphics card) chokes, most notably when running multiple graphics-intensive apps simultaneously, e.g., when running the browser with multiple tabs/sites open, or when manipulating high-res images. I've gone from an 8-year-old quad-processor with a separate graphics card (with its own video card with dedicated GPU and dedicated graphics memory, in immediate proximity) to only two processors with a heavier-than-ever load to handle, ALONG WITH the necessity to share a significant portion of the system DDR3 to execute the graphics functions. Because the memory (and, BTW, processor time) is dynamically allocated between open applications and concurrent graphics processing, not only is less memory available to each concurrently executing process, the computer also has to do more context-swapping than it would otherwise. I read that the CPU actually employs part of its DDR3 L as cache memory. The fact that it does should raise a flag. It might well be part of the reason the first memory bank is soldered in. My 8-year-old Dell laptop actually renders HD images faster than my newer Acer. When I select a high-res image to view, I get to wait and watch while the computer renders it, line by line. SO, if you buy this laptop, you might want to plan on maxing out the DDR3 L. Even then, you might have the occasional crash when concurrently running Powerpoint, a browser, and an image editor or another similarly taxing load.