I bought the Acer Aspire 5102WLMI on Aug. 20!
The unit has been burning in for four days now.
Battery usage 4.0 hours before time to recharge. (settings on medium)
Ac usage continuous with no heat related problems thus far.
The Unit has not been turned off!
All installed factory programs funtional with no errors.
Wireless function has been 100% With LiknSys Wireless-G Broadband.
So far so good. I am pleased. More practical, real world testing to perform.
Bench Mark testing next.
Just think, I almost bought a Gateway for more $$$.

I would rate this a 4.7 on a 1-5 scale.

i give it 4.8

but i am having a problem with the cam and usb. this may be resolved, as i think it was possibly a data error in the pqservice partition.

I am curious aabout your wi-fi success. I found my Acer 5102 worked well about 50% of time at different hotels with wi-fi service. It detected and connected with the internet when it booted up. The other half of the time I either had to repair the network several times or boot it up with a linux program to get a connection. In these cases it would often stop working too for no apparent reason. About 25% of the time I could not get a working connection no matter what I tried. This was very frustrating at times when I could see others working on their laptops around me so I figure it had to be something in the hardware of the Acer since the network apparently worked for others. Some times I suspect the problem may have been the hotel network or their lack of bandwidth.

What experience what others had with their wi-fi when traveling?

so far, excellent - compared with a toshiba and a sony during a trip with 3 students.

It's the worst laptop I got.

After 2 month of usage the hd clicking, and Acer didn't ship a new driver from Dubai to Doha.

Now the Sound card doesn't work too.

I asked them to refund me because it has the worst quality I have ever seen.

Next laptop/notebook should be HP with Vista installed on it as OEM.

sorry to hear you're having problems with it/acer!

Oh ya, HP is a definite improvement in quality and especially customer service.

/sarcasm.

All laptops have problems, and just cuz u had some doesnt mean that company is bad. You should search and read some of the horror stories of dell, or hp or alienware on here. After that, u'll be glad thats all the problems u got and not something worse.

Probably the majority of laptop builders use Hitachi hard drives, which are generally excellent. But they are not perfect. I'm assuming you mean Acer didn't ship a new hard drive from Dubai to Doha, since drivers are available on the net. However, heat and grit are hard drive killers. I don't know your circumstances, but I do know of stories of laptops having very short lifespans in the Middle East dut to the heat and fine dust. If you could invent some sort of heat and dust protection for them, you'd be rich.

I'm very happy with the refurb I'm using after blowing away all the proprietary crap on the original hard drive and installing fresh. It seems very tightly built, I like the keyboard action better than my last laptop, and although I doubt I'll use the webcam or bluetooth, they're nice little touches.
I had to hunt around for drivers, tho, since there wasn't a restore or driver disk included with a refurb.
The best site is the Acer site in Europe:
http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers...5100_5110.html

Which makes me wish the Acer devotees here had someone hosting a drivers and bioses site like Fizi does for Gateways and eMachines. http://emachines.fizi.ca/

Glad to hear you were able to get a replacement laptop. Is it another 5102?

I like your suggestion regarding someone hosting a driver/bios site. Any volenteers out there?

..working on it...

The one driver that had me baffled was the Atheros wireless driver, which I finally found on the Euro site, but don't recall seeing on the U.S. site. Odd that it uses a Broadcom utility, but not their drivers.
Plus the U.S. Acer site was extremely slow......maybe because thousands of other fools like me are downloading drivers!
I bought the 5102 as an advertised refurb, not a replacement. That made it even cheaper, but limits the warranty to 90 days and they don't include software disks, except Norton AV which went into the trash
Well, big whoop, I didn't want the Media Center and other crap that was installed on it anyway, and the Acer installer kept coming up at boot and hanging with the eManagement software or whatever. I happily blew all that away and installed fresh the way I wanted.
It's not intended to be a gamer notebook, that should be clear from the fact the video is integrated in the chipset rather than a dedicated vid card. I've seen threads and queries to that regard from newbies who don't understand that integrated video uses system RAM, end of story, buy more RAM.
For performance, I think that the 1 gig of RAM it came with is about minimum considering it's running a dual-core Turion 64-bit. That reminds me of the muscle cars of the 60's which had huge, powerful engines and not much in the way of steel or a safety cage.
One thing I also noticed about it is that the bios is extremely non-tweakable, similar to the Gateways from Arima corp. That used to drive me nuts with my old eMachines. However, the ATI Catalyst (and all hacked versions) console is extremely tweakable from within Windows. And what I do like about the bios is it offers bootability from any number of different USB devices. ( I upgraded to bios version 2.0, btw.)

an excellent post. very informative and accurate. thanks!