After search engines were dispatching gifts this holiday season to their top advertisers and publishers, Microsoft seems to be gifting free Acer Ferrari laptops powered with Windows Vista to a select group of bloggers.

Scott Beale says that Microsoft sent him a supercompact Acer Ferrari 1000 (12.1 notebook, with an 1.80GHz AMD Turion 642 with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a SATA 160GB hard drive) installed with Windows Vista Ultimate, the top-end edition of Vista for business and entertainment users.

Mitch Denny also got a Acer Ferrari 1000 and talks all about the contents of the box gifted courtesy of Windows Vista team and AMD.

Some got an even better Acer Ferrari 5000 laptop. Zen received an even better model Acer Ferrari 5000 with Windows Vista Ultimate and Microsoft Office 2007. Brandon LeBlanc shares his first thought about his new Acer Ferrari 5000 laptop.

While Long Zheng was describing the top end features of the Acer Ferrari 5000 like AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core 2ghz CPU, 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM, AMD-ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 on a 15.4? widescreen, 160GB SATA drive, HD-DVD reader and burner as well as a 1.3mp camera; Aaron Coldiron from Windows Vista left a comment confirming that Windows Vista and AMD sent out review computers to bloggers and advises full disclosure.

“Full disclosure – while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you dont have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away on your site, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site.”

It seems most of these boxes had a note from Loki, suggesting they might participate in a viral marketing campaign called the Vanishing Point game.

Did you get a free laptop from Microsoft?

Update 1 – Marshall Kirkpatrick has been asked to return his laptop.

Update 2 – What are bloggers doing with their laptops. Scott Beale is selling it on ebay.