My first and only personal laptop that I purchased about a year back(as of 3 Sep 2008).
Specs
Intel Core2 Duo 1.76 MHz
1GB RAM
160GB Harddisk
14" wide LCD screen(glossy finish)
6 cell Lithion Ion inbuilt battery
USB, Bluetooth, Wifi, WebCam, LAN, Card Reader inbuilt.
Software*
It came with a tiny linux distribution pre-installed and cost me 40k INR. I have been very very satisfied with this purchase.
I am a software engineer and I prefer to work in Linux. Usually Linux has a lot of device compatibility problems(compared to say, Windows). But, I didn’t face a single problem with this laptop. All devices work perfectly out-of-the box. The pre-installed linux distribution was a joke. It just booted the kernel and gave me a dumb shell without anything much. I promptly formatted the whole disk and installed Fedora on it. I downloaded the Fedora installation CD from another computer but it would have been better if Acer had provided some installation CDs along with the laptop, since everybody may not have another computer/internet handy.
Price
Price-wise too this was a great deal. It was selling in the US(at that time) for about 600$= 25000 INR. But after taxes and customs the MRP in India was 41k and the dealer threw in a discount of 1k. So, I got it for 40k, which was a great deal, IMO. Dell with a similar configuration was selling for 56k at that time.(Dell was forced to drop its prices in about 6 months of time.)
Keyboard
The keyboard layout is great. The keys are spaced right and respond to touch in expected ways. In fact, I like this laptop’s keyboard more than the Thinkpad series’, which has an extremely cumbersome layout. To its credit, the Thinkpad comes with that little red button in the middle of the key pad which can be used as a mouse, but I don’t use it anyway.
Battery
The battery works flawlessly. While on and being used, the system consumes about 14 to 17W of power. On battery, I get work-time of about 3hrs+. When I suspend-to-RAM, I get battery backup for about 2 days. When I suspend to HDD, the laptop can go without power for 5-7 days!
Bottom line: The product is rock solid. Go for it!