Acer
A Taiwanese company, Acer got its start by offering lower-priced PCs and laptops for sale under the name Multitech, and later under its current name after it was changed in the 1990’s. For a while, Acer offered generic PCs on a wholesale basis to computer stores that wanted to sell them under their own brand names. Now back to offering Acer PCs again, the brand is less well known than that of Dell or HP, but it is slowly making inroads again into the overall market for computers. There are four different Acer laptop computer models, each designed for a different type of user.

The TravelMate series is a model that is designed for high performance and productivity, while still coming in under the hypothetical budget. With a processor that ranges from a Celeron M to a Centrino Duo, both by Intel, and the capacity for up to 2GB of RAM, this model can pack enough power to perform any computing task that most people would throw at it, but is customizable enough to allow for a user who doesn’t need as much power to skimp a little and save some money. In addition, Acer has extended the laptop battery life in this model, to enable more computing time between charges.

The Tablet PC series is actually a version of the TravelMate with a screen that swivels so that the computer becomes almost like an e-book, allowing the user to review and edit documents easily on his Acer laptop. It also has a unique EMR pen input functionality that lets you draw right on the screen, and it even has an eraser capability, allowing you to “erase” any input that was entered using the business end of the pen. And with a Centrino Duo processor and the capacity for 4GB of RAM, it doesn’t sacrifice any computing power for this extra functionality.

The Aspire model is a higher-end version of the TravelMate, with a choice between the Mobile AMD Sempron processor, and the Centrino Duo. The most striking difference between the two models, however, is the size of the screen. Although the screen sizes are identical in the lower versions of each model, the more expensive version of the Aspire has a 20.1 inch screen, which is huge for a laptop, compared to 15.4 inches for the top TravelMate.

Finally, the Ferarri is, well, the Ferarri of Acer notebook computers. Acer put an AMD Turion processor into this speed demon, and packed as much memory and hard drive space as would fit, for a machine that can compete with the highest-end models of any other laptop manufacturer.