I haven't found a news article yet, but I just read that Acer purchased Gateway.  Good frickin' riddance!  Now, if only we can convince them to buy up eMachines, too.

-b0b
(...taps out this message on his Acer lapper.)

Wasn't acer an up and coming company then they kinda died, and now they are on the rise again?

Yeah, Acer was a big name back in the early Pentium generation.  They had a pretty sweet exclusive contract with Best Buy.  My first Pentium PC, a Pentium 100mhz with a whopping 8MB of RAM, was an Acer.

Acer pulled out of the American market a couple years later, though, and I honestly don't know why.  They remained a big contender in the European market, though, and started selling PC's in the US a couple years ago.  They're doing pretty well, considering their low price point and relatively decent quality.  I buy Acer PC's almost exclusively at work, and they've been quite reliable considering the rough environment we have here.  They also clock in at $150-$200 less than a comparable Dell computer.

Personally, I'd love to have a homogeneous Dell network and I'd never buy a non-Dell server if I could help it, but Acer is simply beating the crap out of Dell in the price game.  When you're working with a budget as tight as mine, you've got to save every penny you can.

-b0b
(...takes off his IT hat.)

My boss just pruchased a Dell server with two quad-core Xeons, 8GB of ram, and 6 500 GB HDDs for $4,500.  I guess there was a 25% off special earlier this week.  That knocked off $1,400  :o

If they were 500GB hard drives, they had to be SATA/IDE.  Why in the world would you put SATA drives in a server with those stats?

-b0b
(...ooohs.)