One more thing, make sure you get fully licensed copies of the programs you want.

In my limited experience, both Acer and ASUS are built for bottom line users. Having worked the local regional rummage sale, I find that both seem to be built more by bean counters than engineers. It does pay to spend more for a higher end machine just to reduce the probability of failure.

As far as antivirus and trojans, we use Avast and Glary utiities, both free, and have had no attacks. We run full scans at least once weekly and, despite the "small" size of our hard drives, the machines all run at a reasonable speed.