Acer Aspire 5100-5674

It worked okay (not great) while it was still working. And then literally on day 366 of my owning it (ie literally one day after the warranty expired), it died on me, never to return again.

Running multiple programs was sometimes cumbersome - i thought about adding memory, but it took me a while to motivate on that, and by the time i did, it had died.

And of course, it was doomed by the fact that it was running the original Windows Vista - that did wonders for its performance.

I now believe the reason it eventually died was bc of overheating - it got REALLY, REALLY hot (like, it would burn you if you touched it after it had been on for a while) if you left it on for more than a day. Toward the end of its life, the amount of time you could leave it on for without it overheating became shorter and shorter (and I never put it on any soft/clothy surfaces -- I always had some sort of solid thing I was putting it on so I wouldnt contribute to the overheating). It had either a poor cooling mechanism, or the mechanism that actually generates heat in a computer (i cant remember if it's the processor, the drives, or whatever) generated way, way too much. It if it was the latter, tHis could have been the fault (of course) of the maker of that individual part (eg the drive, if that's the source of the overheating), as you know, most computers (no matter what their outside label says), get the majority of their internal components from all kinds of different companies.