I have owned uncountable computes since I bought my fist Apple "pizza box" desktop computer in 1993.  In our household, we use computers for work, internet access, email, photo and word processing, and (particularly for me) musical notation and audio playback. No games, nothing requiring huge amounts of processing power. But still, this laptop is a quantum improvement over anything--desktop or laptop--I have ever used.I bought one of these for my wife when she retired and needed her own (rather than the office-provided) computer.  I chose this Aspire mainly because it was cheap; but I have been impressed by its performance.  So much so, in fact, that I bought another for myself.The first thing I noticed is how beautiful the display looks.  I used to think my camera took crappy pictures.  Now I know it takes great pictures--it just needs a good computer display to see them at their best.The second great thing is the speed with which this boots up.  This laptop is ready to go in well under half a minute.  And it loads and runs programs fast too.S-mode would never work for us:  too many non-Microsoft proprietary programs that I need to mount--much of it open-source free-ware like Mozilla, Open Office, etc; but I also need many music creation and notation programs, like Finale and Band-In-A-Box  However, it was quite easy to take the computer out of S-mode, and I don't know why some reviewers found that modification hard.I had to buy an external CD drive, as I still need that tech for several  continuing projects.  But that did not add much to the cost, and I think not having a CD drive on a laptop is pretty much the norm now, anyway.There is room for added RAM and a second internal hard drive--which I bought, but have not felt the need to install yet after 6 months of use.My wife's computer has worked flawlessly for the last 9 months.  Bu mine has a couple of glitches, which made me reduce the rating from 5 to 4 stars.Periodically, I get an error message that my USB device (and what peripheral is not USB these days?) is not recognized.  Since I have all my USB devices on a single outlet multiplier, I can simply switch to one of the other laptop ports (there are 3), and that solves the problem, for a while.  When the message comes up again, I switch ports again. So far, so good...A second annoyance is that the audio output jack is iffy and needs wiggling from time to time to perform properly.I don't think any computer I have owned has lasted longer than 5 years  or so--usually slowly degrading until finally needing professional restoration of my data.  I suspect this Acer will last no longer and maybe not nearly as long.  But at the price, we will be quite happy to get two or three years out of these machines.