Acer - Desktop with AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 5000+

If you are considering purchasing this computer system, and you've read these reviews and think that "the network card error won't happen to me" ..please think again. It might happen in one day, two days, or two weeks ...but here I am 12 days later and it happened to me also. I was waiting to write a review just to see if this happened. It did. Computer was running fine, turned it off, rebooted thirty minutes later and network failure. Couldn't find a connection no matter what I tried (reboot, drivers, uninstall, reinstall, update, etc). Support is sketchy through Acer. I didn't get as far as Best Buy, but I'm sure they would have replaced it with no problems. This system model is very new, launched just this month, it's a great little machine for the price, I honestly don't want to have to give it up. I would recommend it...but, only with the stipulation that you should wait awhile before buying it - with any new release there's always going to be glitches and kinks to work out. For those of you who love your little Acer already and don't want to give up on it just yet, I found a temporary fix for the network problem. I'm using mine to type this review - so obviously it's working again. Power off. Unplug the power. Wait a moment and then press the power button. Wait about 30 seconds. Plug in your internet cable and power cable and turn the system back on. It will have hopefully reset for you. Regardless of this temporary fix, if my network card fails again I'm returning it to Best Buy. I'll just have to hope the second time around is a better experience.

When it is stable and all works it is a pretty good system Two issues BIOS and Drivers Yes the BIOS in the model off of the shelf has an issue where the network card fails and you need to unplug the system for about 5 seconds and reconnect to get it to work again. Acer released a BIOS update that fixed this and broke the HDMI audio. There is now another update to the BIOS from Acer that will fix the HDMI. I tried to use the online support to confirm what I was seeing online about the 2nd BIOS update. So I asked has anyone got the HDMI audio to work with the BIOS update Acer response was that something like. That this question was beyond the online technical support ability and that I would need to call in also stating that there would be long hold time. I Simple no but were working on it I guess was too technical. The 2nd issue beyond the BIOS troubles is Windows updates keeps recommending update to the video, audio and modem. If you do the Video update your system will lock up and my not boot. The Audio update installs a Realtech Driver that also keeps your HDMI audio form working and makes the system unstable. Not sure the ill effects of the modem driver I disabled that device. If you made the mistake like I did in absence of a response from Acer on the BIOS issues and started updating drivers you will have a bit of work to get your system running stable again. I managed to get the my system almost stable by uninstalling video and sound drivers and using the nforce drivers from NVIDIAs for HDMI audio and video and network. But before you can reliably install them you have to make sure vista won't keep reinstalling the bad ones.

This is a great little box. For under $500 you get a reasonable dual core CPU, video, with 4GB RAM. Besides lots of USB ports, the X1200 has eSATA and HDMI. It also has some obligatory card reader slots and a DVD writer with Labelflash (like Lightscribe, but not as widely used - discs are harder to find, but BestBuy does sell some). No OS discs are included, but you can restore to factory settings via a hard drive partition. I think you need to boot into the OS at least once to make the restore DVDs for this (It takes three DVDs). Essentially the hardware is pretty good for the price point … as long as you like Vista. As for me, I like XP … with a clean install. I bought this machine to boot XP (and Vista at a later date). Acer doesn't make it easy. It's not tremendously hard, but if you are not comfortable installing drivers or if you have never built a PC before, this box may not be for you. If you want XP, you should be prepared to: 1) spend at some time reading ‘net posts to understand this 2) format partitions for XP (you may need a utility) 3) download SATA drivers for use during the install 4) use nLite to slipstream XP w/SATA driver 4) update the BIOS (newer boxes may not need this) Updated drivers from nVidia are a must. The SATA driver is required for the install (without this you cannot install XP). It is part of the entire nForce driver for this chipset. Search the 'net for Acer X1200 drivers. Posts I found on "techspot" and "aramistech" were very helpful. Although I tried to put the SATA driver on a USB floppy, it was not available when XP was looking for the SATA drivers! The only way I could do this was by adding them with nLite. I had never used it before, it’s pretty cool! This took several hours of reading to find all this stuff. If you follow the advice in this post, you can do it in under an hour, easy. I would have preferred it come with XP, but now it is installed and I have imaged the drive, so it's a moot point. This PC will eventually end up in my entertainment center, maybe as a media PC. It's reasonably small and very quiet (not silent, but close enough for me).

I needed a cheap reliable computer so I decided to go for Acer instead of Dell or HP. I don't know other buyers, but my Acer Aspire is very noisy, the fan starts almost immediately after you start the computer. The computer boasts a dual core processor, so you are supposed to be able to deal with two or more different things at the same time, but no, this computer almost freezes everytime you have more than one application open. If you are online, then don't use Word; if you are downloading a movie or a document, forget about anything else. I am afraid this computer will die any moment, and I did not buy extended warranty :( I am disappointed; next time I will go for Dell or HP.

I was surprised how much power this little PC was packing. 4GB of RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), AMD Athlon x64 Dual Core processor, 320GB HDD, nine USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, etc. The price was incredibly low too, and I thought this was too good to be true...and I was right. The network card died on me 2 days after purchase. I ran multiple tests to make sure that my modem, router, or LAN cable wasn't defective, but everything was fine. I returned the PC to my local Best Buy and noticed that someone else had returned the PC too. I've decided to give it another chance and exchanged it for the same model as maybe I just happened to pick up one of small batch of defective ones and maybe the next one would be defective free...I was wrong. The second one lasted a little bit longer (13 days to be exact), but just like the first one, the network card died on me. Same tests, no luck. I finally returned it to Best Buy and one of the Geek Squad staff told me that Acer is unreliable and told me to go with either a Dell or HP. I finally settled for a Dell. For the moment, I don't seem to have any problem with it. Long story short, this PC would've been flawless if it wasn't for the defective network card. Do not consider purchasing this PC unless you have absolutely no intention of using it for surfing the Internet now or ever. On another note, when you do purchase a PC from Best Buy, consider purchasing their extended warranty just to be on the safe side.

Anyone else experiencing strange noises coming from their cpu and speakers when scrolling or mousing over menu selections from the vista start menu? It is really annoying and starting to drive me crazy - I've read it could be a bad hard drive, bad video card, bad fan, old drivers, power settings, and so on but haven't been able to figure out how to stop this humming/buzzing/chirping sound that happens only when I move my mouse and scroll. Any tips appreciated. Thanks.

Everything about this computer is perfect except................ for the speed. it takes about 3 mins to just turn on and if you don't wait those 3 mins and you press any program like fire fox the screen turns all white (not completely). i suggest you delete McAfee if it comes with it because in my opinion that's what slows down the turning on process. otherwise this product runs grate. after the 3 mins it runs fast and opens everything up fast. i never had a problem with the network card. if you buy this make sure it says Bios updated on a fairly big green sticker on the box I think it wont have the network problem if it says that.

This is a sweet looking computer, and you can’t beat what u get for the money. Setup was a breeze and it runs fast. But after reading the reviews about some of the issues, I decided to call Acer tech support (actually friendly and helpful). He was aware of an issue with the network card - claims the registry can sometimes get corrupted which drops the connection to the internet. Sometimes it’s fixed by unplugging the unit and rebooting, however that is usually a temporary fix. There is a patch that permanently solves the issue and it’s posted on the Acer Support site: http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/portal20.cfm?recordid=5574&formid=3394&website=AcerPanAm.com&siteid=7117&words=all&keywords=&areaid=2 Downloading and installing the update was simple and I still have had no problems whatsoever. This computer is definitely a keeper.