"Who is Acer? I have never heard of them"

That seems to be the most common question and statement we get in our store when we show people our Acer computer line.

People in America have heard of Dell, Compaq, H-P (Hewlett-Packard), and Gateway, but many have never heard of Acer.

We have been buying, selling and using Acer Corporation and AOpen Corporation products since 1994.

In 1994 the computer industry was much different than today. MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 ruled the desktops and the Internet was still very small and limited in its availability.

As a small computer builder, we were limited to buying motherboards, memory, hard drives and processors from back-door distributors who mainly purchased excess inventory and production overruns from the large computer manufacturers of the day like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, IBM and Packard-Bell.

Warranties were very limited and quality control and consistency was unreliable. One might buy ten motherboards and build ten computers which worked well using a particular motherboard model and the next time one ordered that model of motherboard might be out of production necessitating that a builder choose an entirely different model giving different results. It was really frustrating and a difficult time. Ten, twenty and thirty day parts warranties were common and many components were being sold on an AS-IS basis.

AOpen (ACER) Corporation looked and addressed the situation by suing the strength of its relationships with chinese hardware vendors to buy, market and sell and warranty components which consistently worked when you installed them into a machine.

It was like dream come true for computer builders. Suddenly you could buy a motherboard and build a machine and then turn around and buy another one and get the same board with the same results. If the part did happen to fail or have a problem, a rare occurrence, then there was an actual corporation to deal with to get warranty and support.

In 1997, Acer expanded their place in the computer marketplace buy buying the entire Texas Instrument notebook computer division giving them rights to use the name Travelmate for their own notebook computers. They also built and distributed monitors, flatbed scanners, modems, CD-ROM optical drives, memory, power supplies and computer enclosures (cases).

So they have been in the computer and computer component business for a long time. They have experience and they have the business contacts to supply some very good buys in the computer marketplace. Acer recently purchased Gateway Computer Corporation to become the third largest computer builder in the world.