Sorry to hear about the issues, I have several acers and we had a similar but easily fixed problem. The poor airflow is really bad dust protection, So what we do is use a household vacuum cleaner and the crevice tool (narrow slot thing) to vacuum all the cooling ports. Diagnostics usually show a 15 - 20 degree drop in the CPU temp after this. No need to open the Laptop, but it pays to not do while its running. Could be worth a try But based on your experience I think its a lemon. My sons ASUS had some similar issues for a while and needs much more maintenance. My wife Got an HP(Compaq) and seems to have the least issue of us all but she's not running linux The main issue here may be the speed stepping, If the distro can't support all the speed features Battery life suffers but much worse, the CPU doesn't slow down when its quiet and keeps generating heat. My AMD Athlon XP is supported ( but the crappy sis video is not) while my ECS has good Video and sound but no ACPI at all (lucky it runs cool) and the ASUS does most of it well, but its really old. I think my old thinkpad was the best supported Linux laptop ever. but P1 233 96 meg of ram and a whopping 4gb hard drive isn't exactly state of the art. (Thank goodness for Puppy Linux) SO it looks like ACPI support should be added to Video and Wireless as something to check. Mathew Carley wrote:
In my experience, I would not buy another Acer - especially a cheap one. Not because of the lack of Linux support (I've run several Debian Based distros including Breezy and Xandros, Suse 9, 10, Fedora and probably others without too much trouble).
The main reason is the fact that I've had so many problems with the hardware; including the fact that my machine in particular is badly designed (very little airflow over the processor, which is prone to overheating - lucky I can just open the window, and because its -10 outside it cools down OK).