Only problem I've seen with an Acer is my mate's laptop - it decided to kill itself yesterday.
He was using it (in his words) "for two minutes" then it started making noises like it was reading a cd, then started humming. He shut it down and started it up again a couple of minutes later, and it comes up with message saying that just about every port doesn't work and that it can't find an operating system. Other than that, the only problems I've had with it are that it refuses to install AVG Free and Avast just plain won't work. At all. So I had to put a trial of Kaspersky on.
From what I've heard, HP laptops are good, though
What're the specs of this one?