This year, Acer appears poised to overtake Dell as the world’s second-largest seller of personal computers, which would put a real dent into one of America’s favorite dorm-to-empire business stories. And if this comes to pass, Acer would trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.

“That is a big achievement, and they have beaten the odds,” says Roger L. Kay, a PC industry analyst and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consultancy. “Acer is a real comer.”