Acer in trouble? sad news
I like Acer exactly for selling cheap notebook PC's with "no frills", exactly the right set of features. I prefer Intel-based notebooks with chipset-integrated Intel graphics and Intel or Atheros WiFi. 1280x800 used to be a plausible display resolution, before 1366x768 plagued that market segment. Acer traditionally uses a very basic BIOS, with no proprietary "addon MCU" garbage on the motherboard. Compared to that, I've seen several design-level cockups of that category in IBM/Lenovo machines, and generally all sorts of twisted addons or counter-ergonomic "improvements" in Compaq/HP et al. I like the vanilla / "quality no-name" feel of the Acer machines. Whether they're actually made by Compal, Wistron, Foxconn or whoever, doesn't seem to make too much of a difference.
In the recent years, I've ushered maybe 5 or 6 Acer notebooks into our broader family and as far as I know, all of them work to this day, the oldest one has been in service for 5 years and I've been dragging it to workplace and back home every day. I have a third carrying bag, a second power adaptor, a second disk drive, and the notebook still works fine. No broken hinges or whatever, despite the case looking like "cheap plastic". If the CCFL tubes wear out soon now, I'm considering replacing the tubes...
I recall one minor display glitch on a particular Acer notebook model, where some power decoupling capacitors in the display PCB got optimized away, combined with poor 3.3V power rail trainsmission (two tiny pins in the internal LVDS connector) resulting in unreliable display startup, difficult to reproduce - but I fixed that and otherwise they're pretty reliable.
Hard drives are a notorious pain, but that's down to HDD brands and developments, the NTB makers are hardly to blame. I may prefer Seagate over other brands, but that may be my personal opinion.
All "my" Acer notebooks so far had the classic "beveled" keyboard. It's sad that the whole notebook market has shifted to the ugly flat "chiclet" keyboards - looks like another counter-ergonomic twist of fashion, following an apparent general PC hardware marketing trend that mandates something like "users can't really type anymore, so they won't appreciate a real keyboard". First the displays, now the keyboards...
Makes me wonder if the XP "end of updates" finally improves the PC sales numbers :-) Since solid polymer caps and LED-backlit displays, a well-made PC can last forever...