I have been looking into getting one of these Nettop PCs for a while now. The idea of having a super thin, super light terminal that I can hook up to my home network and my TV to view videos on and browse the web has always seemed like a basic thing to have in a home.
I found one of these Acer Aspire Revo 1600 units at TigerDirect.com for $170. It was a refurb, but from my experience, these are actually higher quality since they are inspected more closely than the models that go out as new. I have purchased a lot of refurbished things over the years and have come to the conclusion that the reason they were returned is due to lack of understanding of the product by the original buyer.
The first thing I noticed about this unit is how clogged it came with bloatware. A dozen game demos, Office demos, MS Works, anti-virus, Google desktop, just tons of stuff. So it ran slow and I mean very slow. OK, so I went ahead and uninstalled all of that stuff since I know of lighter freeware alternatives and hey there’s a spry little box under all that clutter.
The model I have only has one GB of DDR2 which hamstrings it a bit, but it still putters around online pretty well. Some video streaming sites don’t do so well, but basic web tasks are just fine. From personal experience, it seems like it is slow because it is always paging to the hard drive. So, it needs more memory. Luckily, you can add up to 4 GB of memory and I do plan on doing so to give this little box a little more pep.
Another drawback is that it does not have integrated WiFi. Well, that’s not a drawback to me since more integrated WiFi solutions in these little boxes has terrible range. So, I find that it is better to just find a good performing dongle and use that. I don’t have to worry about massive range since I live in a medium sized apartment, so I went for the Tenda WiFi 802.11N adapter. It was $15 at MicroCenter and it was very easy to install.
I tried this box in the farthest corned of my apartment and it was still getting full bars, download speeds were also very good and definitely on par with other WiFi solutions I have found. So, the lack of WiFi out of the box is not really a drawback.
The ION graphics do pretty well. I installed World of Warcraft and with the settings set way down (as I knew I would have to set them for onboard graphics). It ran at 25-30 fps. Not great, but not terrible considering the computer is so low on RAM.
The CPU kind of sucks, but it does its job well enough and for a $200 PC it is amazing. It is Hyper-Threaded and handles multi-tasking far better than I expected. The only thing that this machine doesn’t do well is Flash. But then again, I’ve seen Quad-Core i7s where a bit of poorly written Flash code causes full loads on the CPU, so I won’t call that a big setback.
In terms of connectivity, this little guy is amazing. It has 6 USB ports. One of them is capped with a little rubber stopper, but it does work. It has a media-card reader on the front as well as audio inputs for a headset and an e-Sata port for external hard drive. It also has VGA and HDMI on the back. The HDMI is the main draw of this box as it will power a 1080p set making your thousand inch TV able to browse the web. Yeah, that is as cool as it sounds.
The keyboard and mouse it comes with are pretty lackluster but they do function and do so well enough. The keyboard has that chicklet layout that Apple pioneered with its laptops and the feel of the keys is actually quite good. This is a compact keyboard, so you do not get a num-pad. This is slightly better than a netbook keyboard. Functional, but not much more. It looks nice though with a nice finish on the face of the casing.
The mouse is crap. It is too light and squeaks when you click it. The scroll wheel is also too big for the mouse, but again it is functional and usable, but not great by any stretch of the imagination.
Overall, the unit is nice and small, and once you de-clutter it, it does a great job as an internet terminal. Just don’t expect it to replace you full-tower box unless your full-tower box is from 2000 or earlier.
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