I bought a new Acer Ferrrari 3000 laptop for my daughter. Hot machine with a Mobile AMD 2500+ cpu. It came formated with FAT. I've been using NTFS for years now. Just finished setting it up with all the good stuff she needs for digital photography, word processing, etc.

I am taking this Canada purchased pc with me to give to my Italy based daughter who is not terribly computer literate.

The pc is neat when it boots. A Ferrari zooms by at hi rpm's. :)

Shall I leave it FAT? or covnert it to NTFS?

Leave it.
I'm totally for NTFS compared to FAT32. But; conversion introduces heavy fragmentation. Then if she runs into problems it seems as she will call you and then you'll ask her to ask somebody closer to here to help here and then you don't know what will happen. If you keep the file system FAT chances are that somebody can help here with more easy.

Convert it.
NTFS is preferrable in every way (according to me). Just make a backup first, then convert it and run a complete defrag. Then make a new bootable backup to accompaign the Ferrari back to Italy and you should all be happy.

Well... It's a nice machine - why should it suffer from FAT?

Good advice, unicorn. And besides, I've been hot testing it heavily the past few days and everything is "perfect". If it ain't broke don't fix it! is a good motto. :)