are poo.

i say this in a restrained and dignified manner, having been a systems support and hardware technician. i am quite good at the fixing-the-dead-laptop and liaising with 3rd party thing, but i will not touch Acer. Their support people are having trouble with their opposable thumbs, an advanced interface they seem yet to be able to utilise fully..

guese the IOC are still accepting highest-brown-enveloped-bidder requests..

Acer couldn't make a safe PC if their fiscal life depended on it. Every Acer Windows XP notebook PC I've seen since the Travelmate 2500 shipped without the built-in safety of the NTFS file system. Apparently this is because the "Empowering Technology" components don't work with it:

http://www.antiwindowscatalog.com/?mode=product&id=65

So, while the IOC might choose to turn on the safeties in Windows or not with Dell's PCs, they won't have a choice with Acer. That is, unless the IOC forces Acer to fix their garbage first.

Acer maybe aren't the best & maybe they do have some flaws but this could be the boost they need to invest and get them up to date.

Lenovo retained the contract in 2004 from the purchase of IBM's client business. This contract is worthless from a profitability perspective. However, it's cheap advertising and marketing for Acer, which has a fair consumer presence, but is rarely the choice of business customers.

Let's see - buy the commercial time or do a trade? Probably a no-brainer for Acer.

As there's little profit in the consumer space these days, I'd wager that Dell probably didn't bid on this or if they did, they probably didn't go too deep as the corporation's focus right now is on profitable business, not growth at any cost.