My wife and I both bought Acer's in March of this year. She has a travelmate 8210, and I have a Aspire 5580. The IT guy at here factory turned us on to buying them, and he is absoluty thrilled about the computers.
Pro's
-Centrino processor is fast and can multi task well.
-Both of our computer's included nice media packages and have nice lcd screens for easy viewing.
-Acer tech support is good, not the quickest in the world, but they stand behind their product.
-Acer offers a program they install on all of their computers that allows you to speed up most used programs, set all of you setting, control batter life, ect from one screen.
-Built in web cams have nice picture quality.
-Battery life for the 8210 is outstanding for a laptop.
-Computer's come with a full array of programs for just about everything you'll need to do what a computer.
-Acer has a built in recover system, that in the event of a crash, they can TRY and recover the computer (they won't tell you this is there, until you have a major issue and call tech support for help)
Con's
-Not sure if they can handle the vibration and abuse of the road. Mine has had two hard drives and a mother board installed since March of this year. Actually Acer has had the computer more than I have.
-Tech support is SLOW.. If you send it in, don't expect to get to get your computer back for a few weeks. Or longer..
-If you have a issue and it has to be sent in, you have to pay to have it shipped for repair.
-Battery life on the 5580 is about 20 minutes. Can be stretched out to an hour if you set all options to maximize battery life.
I know this post was just about the computer being on sale, but thought I would let everyone know what my experience thus far has been with Acer's. They are all around a good computer. And when mine when into the shop for the second time, they exstended my warranty out for another two years. So they do stand behind their product. I went ahead and bought the exstended warranty on the wife's also, just in case.. LOL