"eMachines is for the bottom feeders – you know, the type of people who shop at Aldi." so we're now bottom feeders for shopping at aldi? Nice. Have fun spending twice as much for identical products then :)

... buy Medion, at least here in the US. Not that I know what Medion is.

Aldi is quite good value. We shall all be shopping there soon, as the economy goes into free fall.

Never really been taken with an Acer machine, I will be happy when they just sell a selection of shells and parts so you can make your own.

Closest you get there is with the Clevo chassis. Hand built machines are so much better than factory built, and you can swap out the BIOS and add another one in whilst you are in the build.

Core-boot looks quite good, boot time to console is as low as 3 seconds. If HP would sell some of their chassis un-badged that would make for quite a good basis for a mean machine.

I really liked those Aspire desktops that were out about 10 years ago.

Its all "branding" and not that much advantageous in terms of hardware. My last two laptops, in the last three years, have been ASUS which I found to be far better specced that the equivalently priced Acer !! Why TWO, cos one is for my daughter to do her graphics thingies !!

The only two laptop "makers" that actually make their own machines are Lenovo and ASUS. The rest just outsource the manufacturing (badge engineering, to us old farts) !!

Are bottom feeders.......

What epithet should we ascribe to the type of chav^H^H^H^H people who shop at Lidl?

Acer typically designates a Maple tree, for instance acer palmatum, which is a dwarf maple, also known as a Japanese Maple. Which is not tall or terribly strong.

Paris because her brain is a dwarf as well, acer parismatum.

A few years ago I worked as a developer for a company that exclusively used Acer equipment. At that time they where very cheap and very nasty. Things change but I won't be using my own money to find out.

Agreed! I work at a school where we had a batch of about 100, and about half of them (mine included!) more or less fell apart after about 6 months with various build quality issues. This was about 12-18 months ago. Consequently I'll never touch them with any of my own money.

Acer have funny ideas when it comes to warranties. It can be anything from 3 months to a year, depending on whether the hardware is the main board, a laptop battery or keyboard.

Personally, if they can only guarantee a keyboard for six months I hate to think what the quality of the rest of the gear is like.

Steer clear.

Where i work, my predecessor bought a batch of 20 or so late P4 H/T Acerpower F5 and FG's - quite simply horrible cheap tat. The onboard Marvell NIC's have a habit of dying, the fan speed controllers die so that the CPU and case fans are at 100% constantly. Driver updates are few and far between, and you cant use standard ATI catalyst drivers for the onboard VGA, you have to use Acer's 2 year old packages from the website. Performance isn't great either, running XP SP2 on a GB of RAM (plenty you'd think)

I've always preferred HP, or failing that i'd go with Dell, had no experience of Lenovo or Fujitsu....but Acer won't be getting any of my money any time soon

I find it strange that they keep the Packard Bell brand here in Europe, as that brand has a pretty poor reputation (at least with somewhat technically minded people).

The Acer brand has a somewhat better reputation (but not as good as dell or HP).