Get the Acer, personally I wouldn't touch anything with Hell, sorry Dell on the box. The most unreliable kit I have ever had the misfortune to use, they're cheap for a reason...

Seriously, I am supplied with a Dell laptop where I work, so far I have had 2 hard disks, 3 motherboards, 2 modems, 2 keyboards and 2 mouse pads in the last 2 years, I support around 150 servers, 95% of those are Dell also, the remainder being HP/Compaq, the Compaq boxes are 5-6 years old and never miss a beat, Dell servers just die when you reboot them.

I know plenty of people with Acer laptops, in fact I recommended one to Lily's parents as I know they're so reliable - it would be me that would end up fixing it remember...

I have been with Dell stuff for years since going with IBM, Compaq, Sanyo (they made a great laptop way ahead of its time, but then pulled out of the business) Epson, NEC. I have a Dell laptop at work and at home, both of which have gone overseas with me numerous times. Desktop at home is still going strong and I have another one with Win 95 on it as a playstation, DOS machine. Normal problems with most of them, but nothing really major and the engineers have come to my home for service on my Win95 and my newest XP machines (but only twice). We have Dells at work interspersed with other stuff, but our SE and his assistant both have Dells.
It was mentioned to get more memory at first and that is wise advice and probab ly cheaper in the long run. Laptops are pretty limited in what they can use and getting 512 at first and then upping to 1G later may mean throwing out the 256 rams for 2 new 512 ones...Also, 40G Hdd sounds awful small for stuff these days and I find it limits what I can do on the one at home when working with videos or other big files, even with an external 160ghz in the network.
Here in Japan the 3 year warranty is only about another $110 US and worth it.
Let us know what you decide..

Well see what happens even when I talk about them...

6pm last night walking out the door, Dell Poweredge 6450 dropped it's external raid array... spent the next hour sorting that, just dropped the array for no apparent reason, kicked about 60 users off (luckily most had already left) but killed the blackberry service for about 5000...