gotta hand it to acer , I picked up one of there laptops for 300 euro , its only 1 ram , but fine for my need , but if I had a thousand euro I would have got a mac , there ment to be light years ahead !

Both HP and Acer make great products. HP, however force feeds a lot of junk software and more than that the software shares usage info back to HP. Some of the software is geared towards getting you buy something. This results tying up your system resources and constant annoyance for the user. For the past several years I have been able to redirect many friends to other brands such as Acer who do not practice this in thieir products.
I consider this equally important to price for users in the know!

Must be really diffrent in Europe compared to the US then.

Installed a new Acer last week... i counted at least 15 crapware applications on that one.

also installed som HP machines. they usually have MS Office 2007 Trial, then McAfee .... but you get asked if you want is during install....and if you say no..its gone.
...then a PDF application that is purly crap...i'll give you that.. ..but thats 1 application that is usless. 1 that you might want in Office .. and some AV you might want .... ... 3 apps ... compareds to atleast 15 in an Acers.

But this in North Europe ... maybe its completely diffrent in the US

...all i can say is that here HP support is brilliant .. and they include almost no crap....

Acer sold Vista machines (laptops ) with 512MB RAM!!! ..1GB is to little...512MB is insane.
They are loaded with crap so it takes 2 -3 hours to install brand new machine... ..their support is non existent ...and the quality of the machines are mostly so so ...

but like i said .. it could be that its just like this here. ... for me HP is king no matter what they cost. (if you stay away from cheap Radio/tv store modells made specially for that market.... cuz they are crap ´from all brands)

yes, let's say the price is kind of lower than before, but how about the quality then? according to the news article, the lower price acer has cheap hardware, does this mean that the quality of the new low price acer now is not even the same as before? i personally don't like acer for the one we have back home usually got misfunctioned and always needs reformatting. and now they are compromising the quality of their product just to reach they goal to sell 40 millions of netbooks next year?

buyers now a days thinks of the quality first than the price. i don't know for some but for me, i stand on the importance of quality especially the duarability of the product...

instead having a price war, why can't they just have "quality war" or "new features war"... it will be a lot better perhaps..

The joy of capitalism and a consumers market... go Acer.

This is a good deal for all consumers. But Acer must also make good quality laptops for consumers to buy their product.
Previously Dell is the number 1 seller on laptops. Now HP has taken over and Acer is catching up. This will be a battle of quality and pricing, also include the features of the laptop that will sold to consumers.

all acer,HP,DELLS and all got a little junk software and poor support ,pooriy make. is yes to all.So if you got to get a netbook or laptop u got to live with it.

Yeaaaaaa!!!!!
Been trying to decide between upgrading desktop ( MB, CPU and Mem ) or a new laptop. Guess I'll put off the decision for awhile.

Acer was always cheaper than HP when you consider the tech specs of their products, but that doesn't mean that they provide the same quality.
For example all the Acer notebooks that I had the chance to test had cheap casing and really really crappy keyboard. When compared to their HP counterparts the slight price difference suddenly seems insignificant.

I hope we (The consumers) benefit from good quality hardware and free DOS (Also Linux might get a huge lift here since it will definitely lower computer without windows expensive licenses).

Talking to friends I don't consider netbooks as disposable as others would sugest, so quality casing and hardware are not in discuss here, hope they don't discuss it either.

Price waaarrr !! let us, consumers, pick up the peaces

I bought a laptop about 3 months ago. I did a lot of shopping around and chose an Acer. At the time HP could not compete with Acer on price. I ended up buying the Aspire 5739 for around $650. It's good to see competition.

I used to setup computers all day long for my work and honestly I thought more times than not hp computers were unbelievibly slow for the hardware that was in them. I honestly thought the computers that on average ran fastest out of the box were gateways. Any computer you get that isn't custom built will have its fair share of crapware though. Just go into the purchase looking at hardware vs price and expect to reformat when you get it..or clean up very well. But that's just my opinion.

In point of view only reducing price on notebook/netbook won't increase much chance to compete with HP. HP is world's no 1 company in desktop/laptop selling. Acer has to adopt very aggressive marketing, open their customer center in different country, give some free give away to spread news about new ACER desktop/ laptop /netbook. I believe in this world only marketing from tv, internet only doesn't work. You have to reach to public too from mouth to mouth advertising. I also believe lot of revenue for HP comes from corporate world too. So Acer has to look for that option too. They should give some good deals for leasing the desktop / laptop to corporate world. If they gain on corporate world then lot of people will start using ACER desktop/laptop at office location. So they will slowly start getting inclined towards ACER.
This is very long process and i am not saying this is going to happen overnight but in order to get the number one spot in world market under PC selling company, there is lot to prepare and plan and start implementing.

Nowdays there aren't many laptop makers that can afford to sell sub-par products, if there are any.
I don't think Acer or any other major manufacturers would settle for quick selling large quantities of crap products, because after all when the word spreads out (if the products are bad) it would hurt their company significantly, long term profit = 0.
It is misfortunate that you had problems with your laptop, but basically price war between them is a good thing for the consumer, just look at Ati & Nvidia.

HP is a giant.And their products are great.So it won't be easy for Acer to defeat HP in the marketing sector.

Now I'm really looking forward to black friday.