I would be completely unsurprised to find that an Acer Aspire V3 is ten times faster than a last-generation PowerBook G4.
To put it simply, nothing Apple built in that timeframe was fast or even very well put together. It's best, in my experience, to just sort of pretend Apple totally mysteriously didn't build laptops at all between when they stopped making the Pismo and the 500/600MHz Rage graphics iBooks, until late 2008 when the unibody MacBook/Pros came out. If there was ever proof that throwing money at a problem isn't always the best solution, it's early-mid 2000s Apple. Just because you tossed $2500 into a PowerBook G4 and got an expensive computer doesn't mean that you got a good computer.
So if you're looking for something cheap that's about a decade old that will feel better than your Acer computer, then a ThinkPad or Latitude is going to be a good system to look at. I personally favor ThinkPad T/R 60-series and 400/600 series with Core2Duo CPUs. I have a T400 I bought new in early 2009 and it still does everything I need just fine. It has since been outpaced by what are essentially netbooks, but Merom and Penryn Core2 hardware is now "cheap or free" class and you can typically easily upgrade and maintain these types of systems, especially business notebooks such as ThinkPads or Latitudes.
If "fast" is the priority above all else: you already have it, and perhaps you should investigate making an image of the drive and trying out Linux. If it works properly, WINE shouldn't actually slow down the execution of Photoshop, etc, since you're still running Intel code on an Intel CPU.
Of course, I personally think that the best solution may be to use the Windows 8.1U1 installation media (which you already created, along with a backup of your system, because you have a tech blog, right?) and using that to set up your system in a stable state, with none of the included junk ware from Acer. If the system just has a bad trackpad, it may not fix that, but it'll probably fix the performance problems as well as any lingering issue caused by junk software, such as unreliability, etc.
To put it simply, nothing Apple built in that timeframe was fast or even very well put together. It's best, in my experience, to just sort of pretend Apple totally mysteriously didn't build laptops at all between when they stopped making the Pismo and the 500/600MHz Rage graphics iBooks, until late 2008 when the unibody MacBook/Pros came out. If there was ever proof that throwing money at a problem isn't always the best solution, it's early-mid 2000s Apple. Just because you tossed $2500 into a PowerBook G4 and got an expensive computer doesn't mean that you got a good computer.
So if you're looking for something cheap that's about a decade old that will feel better than your Acer computer, then a ThinkPad or Latitude is going to be a good system to look at. I personally favor ThinkPad T/R 60-series and 400/600 series with Core2Duo CPUs. I have a T400 I bought new in early 2009 and it still does everything I need just fine. It has since been outpaced by what are essentially netbooks, but Merom and Penryn Core2 hardware is now "cheap or free" class and you can typically easily upgrade and maintain these types of systems, especially business notebooks such as ThinkPads or Latitudes.
If "fast" is the priority above all else: you already have it, and perhaps you should investigate making an image of the drive and trying out Linux. If it works properly, WINE shouldn't actually slow down the execution of Photoshop, etc, since you're still running Intel code on an Intel CPU.
Of course, I personally think that the best solution may be to use the Windows 8.1U1 installation media (which you already created, along with a backup of your system, because you have a tech blog, right?) and using that to set up your system in a stable state, with none of the included junk ware from Acer. If the system just has a bad trackpad, it may not fix that, but it'll probably fix the performance problems as well as any lingering issue caused by junk software, such as unreliability, etc.