Well, Acer is well known laptop provider and they are good with that but if you are comparing to other good brands as like Dell or HP or Toshiba.. I would definately not recommend you to go for ACER. Dell or HP is way much better than ACER. And I guess you alreadu found the comparision online by googling if not then check the CNET's comparision pages.
They have cheap acer laptops at bestbuy... It depends on what is inside the laptop... I might purchase one soon... if you want me to give you my review if i buy it let me know..
I never said I had Norton because I used AVG, all I know is I ran the error checker and instead of fixing the errors it created them so much that my restore cd didnt even work. Now Im using ubuntu off a live cd Im going to Frys tomorrow and going to buy and HP,Acer or Mac(imac or macbook)
I see, bad sectors then. Your retailer should replace the HDD because of the bad sectors. Most HDD's come with at least 3 years warranty (or at least they used to). But that's probably a moot point because you've decided to go shopping. I used to run Goblin-X off a live cd when my HDD got into bad sector problems. Reminded me of the good old days of the 286 pc's. I only had 768MB RAM so that didn't help in speeding Goblin-X up. Well have a good time shopping.