I got this as a graduation present about a year and a half ago and I cannot take it to class with me. The battery life is HORRIBLE! It might last an hour and a half.

After having it less than 6 months the mother board died on me conveniently two weeks before my first finals. I had done NOTHING to it except let it sit on the table plugged in for two days. No food, but my dad still doesn't believe me.

It is very noisy. The disc drive constantly falls off when I try to put CD's in and it is extremely noisy... not that it really matters since the speakers are TERRIBLE! The sound quality is extremely distorted. Plus the CPU unit is also extremely noisy at times... my friends think I'm torturing it when I'm searching google.

The touch pad sometimes does whatever it wants to, and it takes FOREVER to start up. It will just show a black screen for a few minutes before showing the home screen. While my friends have a very good wireless connection on their laptops, mine wont even recognize there is a network at all (and yes I did figure out how to turn it to wireless).

The laptop is overall easy to use... if it would work correctly. I HIGHLY recommend NOT buying this horrid device Dell Vostro A860. Although it is cheap, it is not worth wasting your money on.

The screen quality on this laptop is good. TO BAD THAT IS THE BEST THING ABOUT THIS. It is cheap and affordable to buy for school use (it is what you pay for because it is not a good computer). The graphics card is integrated which means if you ever want to play a downloadable game...TOO BAD.
This graphics card is the lowest quality one that Intel makes. If you want a laptop for adobe program use like photoshop and after effects. It has very slow processing and rendering time. The battery life on power saver is only like 2 hours when fully charged. Other laptops I have seen get around 5-10. I do not recommend this computer to anyone who isn't a school student that only uses this for typing and saving files.

* The sharp hard disk noise that you cannot avoid noticing, and eventually bothered by.
* CPU fan sometimes works really hard for the system to stay live - and you can feel you're some where near a flour mill is running, even if you've never been there.
* The hotter it gets the longer you work.

I LIKE IT
EASY TO USE
WORK WITH WIN 7 WITH OUT ANY UP DATE DRIVERS :)

battery life is very bad,i dont reccomend this Dell Vostro A860

The Dell Vostro A860 works sluggishly with only one Meg of RAM. I'm about to install the maximum now. Screen terrific, sound not bad, keyboard excellent arrived ready-to-go. Value unbeatable!
I don't like the Vista o/s but that's not Dell's fault!

Works nice no probs but I had to upgrade ram to 3gb. Then it runs nice. Nice display, user friendly, good value for money.

If you're looking for a low cost Dell laptop with good performance then you could do a lot worse than go for a DELL A860 Laptop. I've been really pleased with mine. I went for the 2GB memory model with Vista Business installed and it's been a joy to work with.

No hesitation in recommending the Dell Vostro A860 Laptop.