Agree about the Acer thing. I had one, didn't last two years. Had a little problem: the graphics chip would tend to overheat and break free from its contacts. We sent it to repair (free of charge, luckily), they of course gave us the same model again, it overheat and damaged the motherboard. Got rid of it and I'm now happily typing on a desktop pc, even if this one is not really that reliable either. No more laptops for me, at least for quite a while. Too bad cause that laptop wasn't half bad either.

Don't know about Asus, but just yesterday I had my dad on the phone asking me advice, trying to fix one that belonged to his cousin. Turned out to be a problem on the sound card, a piece of shit Realtek. Those things have been having problems since the dawn of time, it seems. I had already fixed the same type of issue on a desktop computer that's 11 years old (if I recall correctly) : every sound played way too fast, and so did videos (cause they probably tried to keep up or something).

Nothing that a simple download of a driver from Realtek's site didn't fix... but still!