surprise!
is it a coincidence that they are the netbook maker selling the small cheap netbooks?
The ongoing global Meldown isn't melting everyone, as Taiwan's Acer demonstrated in its 2008 financial results, released Tuesday. In fact, 2008 was a growth year for the world's third-largest PC maker, with operating income up a hefty 38 per cent from 2007: income was $428.8m (£299.8m) in 2008, up from $310.3m (£217m) in 2007 …
Given my two overseas trips this year, I finally caved in and ordered a mini-laptop (I refuse to call something almost as powerful as my 1.8GHz home desktop a netbook) yesterday. The Asus Eee 1000HE, for $400 -- after bumping the RAM to 2 GB, which might even make the little beast faster than my 1 GB desktop. OK, so I do have an old desktop, handed down to me from a friend a couple weeks ago (you should see how fast it feels running Kubuntu compared to my previous computer...).
Unfortunately, I was forced to buy the XP version, since there is no Linux one that is not a small, slowish SSD (actually, a small SSD + slower flash) version. I feel bad wasting money on something I don't need. But that's life. I will definitely investigate whether I can get a refund though, no matter how small, just as a matter of principle.