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.)

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.)

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.)