Like other Acer laptops, the 7552G-6436 has a full-size keyboard (with number pad) featuring floating Chiclet-style keys. The matte-black keys are large and nicely spaced, which should make the keyboard easy to type on. But because the keys give extremely light tactile feedback, touch-typists may find a lot of typos in their copy.

Each keystroke produced a loud thumping sound (along with the regular click) that reverberated through the keyboard, and our review model's keyboard was slightly warped. The problem didn't affect typing accuracy, but it was visually displeasing and doesn't speak very well of the builder's craftsmanship.

A thin silver border distinguishes the small, matte gray trackpad from the rest of the wristpad. At the bottom of the trackpad is a thin rocker-bar, in lieu of discrete mouse buttons; and on the right side is a scrolling section. The non-multitouch trackpad is a little sluggish and a little too small: You'll quickly find your finger at the edge. The rocker-bar is easily clickable, but the scrolling area works only half the time, so you'll have to use either the on-screen scroller or the arrow keys. Unfortunately, the Function key sometimes turns the arrow keys into volume controls, complicating the situation further.

The Acer's 17.3-inch glossy LCD screen has an aspect ratio of 16:9 and a native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels. Color rendition and saturation seemed good, though colors occasionally looked washed out. Viewing angles are good, so looking at the screen from a fairly sharp angle doesn't seriously degrade the picture. Because of the glossy surface, you'll see plenty of reflections over your shoulder, but the screen's brightness combats this, if you're working in bright or direct sunlight.

The Acer 7552G-6436 disappoints in performance, with a World Bench 6 score of just 80. This is a dismal mark compared to the scores posted by the on PCWorld's charts, but it is fast enough for everyday computing and reasonable for the budget price. Graphics performance is a little better, but still subpar for the category. In our Unreal Tournament 3 tests, the Acer managed a frame rate of 66.3 frames per second at a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, using high quality settings. By comparison, the (currently) #10 managed 80.66 fps, and the (now) #1 Dell XPS 17 3D sustained 119.65 fps, both at the same settings.