Acer MIC audio problem

I have 7 (yup, seven) Acer 11.6" laptops - covering 1830, 1810, 1410, O751, O756 - yup, all the way up to what is currently on the kiosk at Costco ... Every single one of these has terrible internal mic audio - best case the there is just a high noise level - continuous static. Most of the time, in addition to this, there is noise from the fan, the HDD, the WLAN (clicks), the WWAN/3G (chirps). There are various 'driver' 'bandaids' applied to try and hide the noise, which further degrades the audio, making it both unsuitable for speech recognition, and for human listening. The common elements in these LT's seems to be the use of realtek hardware and a mic in the screen bezel. I recommend against getting any Acer product unless you don't care about mic audio... they do not seem serious about quality.