Overall verdict: good for the first few months, BAD after that! DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THE ACER ASPIRE 5536!

When I first bought this laptop in October last year, it performed pretty well. It came with Windows Vista (~puke~), plus the free Windows 7 upgrade option. I quickly formatted and replaced Vista with XPSP3 which is better by orders of magnitude, not caring to bother with 7, as maximum system stability and practicality were my key concerns, rather than how shiny the graphics were.

As I said, at first everything was great, apart from the super-shiny screen which makes it impossible to see anything in brightly-lit conditions (but seemingly all new laptops have this, so it's an unfair criticism of this particular model), and the Synaptics touchpad which took a lot of getting used to, and seemed to respond very inconsistently. The battery life is not great, at around 1.5 hours at most when unplugged, but it's ok.

However, a few months after purchase, the real killer problem began to emerge- namely the terrible overheating. I noticed immediately after purchase that very CPU-intensive programs (Handbrake, 3DS Max, After Effects, Valve Hammer Compiler and any other rendering software in particular) was effectively useless on this machine, as it would overheat and automatically shut down after a few minutes of these apps running.

After 4 or 5 months, this problem extended to many different, substantially less intensive programs such as simply watching streaming video online for more than a few minutes at a time. Playing even old games is frought with problems- Call of Duty 2, which runs acceptably on medium settings, will typically last around 10-15 minutes, before the CPU overheats, and ~POP~ off it switches. I recently installed SpeedFan to monitor the core temperatures, and under any kind of load, the CPU can easily exceed 90 degrees C or more.

My advice as a long-term user of the Acer Aspire 5536 is, if you only need this for simple stuff like browsing, emails, word docs etc, then it'll be well up to the task. However, if you play games of any kind, or tend to watch a lot of videos and do other power-hungry stuff, you'll be better off getting a laptop which was actually designed with enough cooling power to cool itself effectively.

Overall, I wouldn't reccommend the Aspire 5536. I wish I'd spent my money on a proper brand of laptop like Dell, IBM or Toshiba, rather than this shiny, badly-performing, mass-appeal pile of rubbish. I've also read several reports of other models in this series having serious overheating problems, so I'd reccommend avoiding Acer altogether if you want a decent, well-designed machine.