As someone who typically builds their own desktop PCs, i am pleasantly surprised with this laptop. I got this aspire 5 during the prime day sale where it was 260$, and even at its normal price of 306$ its really solid. Acer has videos on youtube that show you how to add an additional hard drive, so that was helpful. I put in a 1TB SSD and another 8GB of ddr4 sodimm ram. There were 2 slots for ddr4 sodimm ram, so I think you could potentially get 16GB total ram in this laptop if you had two 8GB sticks. When i had the laptop open, it APPEARED AS IF you could take out the 128GB PCIE NVME SSD that ships with the laptop and put in a larger one, so that's an idea. I mainly got this laptop to use to play everquest (a very old computer game), and do some light web browsing etc,  and have as a laptop that i can carry around without worrying about dropping a 4000$ laptop on the ground. It has an ethernet port, usb 3.1 ports, hdmi port, etc, so thats convenient compared to my macbook (which only has thunderbolt 3 ports and requires dongles or adapters for everything). The backlit keys are great and the keyboard feels good. If you dont like how the function key operates and you use the F1-F12 keys a lot, you can spam F2 while the computer is restarting and go into the BIOS and change the function key behavior. I am still getting a feel for the battery life so i cant comment too much on that, but the battery lasts a while and it seems to take about 2-3 hours to charge it empty to full. It ships with windows 10 S mode which sucks, you can go to the windows store and "switch out" of S mode for the regular windows 10 home operating system. Overall i am really loving this laptop, it was very affordable, easily upgradeable hard drive and memory, and it is working great. The only thing that is a little underwhelming would be the speakers aren't the best and don't go as loud as i would like sometimes.