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You have three laptops in your signature... which one is the BIOS for?
There does appear to be a few BIOS updates that could affect the hardware in a positive capacity - but unless you're planning on upgrading something like the RAM for example, I don't necessarily think its needed - sometimes hw upgrades will refuse to work with an older BIOS properly (or at all) and in those instances its good to have the upgraded version (or just to work properly with Windows).
A new BIOS version could include better RAM support (allowing you to install RAM of higher capacity and speed - but also make sure to pick RAM with lowest timings).
If the system is running fine at the moment, then I wouldn't be in much of a hurry to update the BIOS because if something goes wrong during the BIOS install (even if you do everything right) and the BIOS ends up corrupted (which is what happened to me - I installed the latest BIOS version 'properly' and for some inexplicable reason, it ended up corrupted anyway - the previous two BIOS version upgrades installed fine), you end up without a laptop... and if its not under warranty, then getting it back to operational status would entail either a BIOS recovery (Which can be problematic at best and not necessarily reliable) or a new motherboard at worst (very expensive) - and if it is under warranty, you can just RMA it and say it stopped posting (Windows updates have been known to update the BIOS apparently for some people - although personally, I hadn't encountered that ever).
Any system performance improvements from a BIOS upgrade would be minimal (unless you experienced system slowdowns since you bought the machine)... but at times, people did experience noticeable boosts.
Note: if you are experiencing issues with system performance, the best thing to do would be to perform a CLEAN Windows install.
One of the best ways to gain performance improvements in your machines would be to replace the HDD with a SATA SSD drive (1TB or 2TB).
That would be the single best upgrade you could do to either of them (but I'd focus on the Acer).
The Core2Duo machine... not sure how much you'd gain from upgrading that... but if you have some spare cash and want to play with it... you could upgrade the RAM to higher speed/capacity and HDD to SSD - but its an old machine that I really don't see much point in doing that (besides the tinkering factor) unless you want to offload it to someone else.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
