Homedad, I pretty much had the same system as you, but it was emachines and upgraded the ram to 1 gig. Had it for about 4.5 years and 2 weeks ago my powr supply and motherboard went. It was getting slow, but I think my Nortons had something to do with that.
Just received my new Dell Inspiron with AMD athlon processor, 2gig ram, 360gig drive and Vista.
I saw an Acer with similar spec and my neighbour in the IT business said that Acer, Gateway, emachines are prone to failure. He fixes them a lot and replaces them, plus he told me to go look at the stores that sell refurbs or tigerdirect and I will see a lot of Gateway, Emachines on there for that reason.
Make sure you backup your important data as you might be heading for a breakdown like I had. My new computer is fast compared to my old one, but vista takes some getting used to.
