The Acer  Line of Cheap Desktop Computers

The Acer T180 is a bargain-basement PC, with a price of only $379 (direct) before monitor. It has a certain value, at least to users who don't need much more than a cheap desktop computer. You can use it to surf the Web and do homework and basic computing tasks. It's an okay choice for the modest computer user (or one who was excited by the idea of a $99 Zonbu PC but there are better choices for only about $100 more.  The T180 is housed in a fairly stylish silver-and-black minitower case, with LEDs for power and hard drive activity set inconspicuously on top (unlike the exposed LEDs on the front of other tower PCs). Nothing too fancy; it's a cheap desktop computer, after all. The T180 holds a single-core AMD  Athlon 3800 processor, adequate for viewing most static Web pages. Still, with rich, multimedia-based Web sites becoming the norm today, I would be afraid the T180 won't be able to keep up. It had trouble playing back 1080p and 720p movie trailers, but relatively small YouTube-style videos did play back okay.

The T180 has a lot of expansion possibilities inside, including space for up to four RAM DIMMs, two PCI cards, one PCIe x1 card, and a single PCIe x16 slot for a graphics card. The case is free of internal obstructions and loose cables, so it would be a good tinkerer's system if it had a processor worth keeping.

 
The T180's 160GB hard drive is par for the course in the cheap desktop computer arena these days. It has plenty of room to support even an 80GB iPod or other music player. The included FireWire port will interface with your camcorder, and the system's multimedia card reader will help if you have a digital still camera.
 
Performance was average for a single-core system, which is to say a little behind the times. In fact, on an Adobe Photoshop test, the T180 posted the slowest time in recent memory: 5 minutes 21 seconds. The system's Windows Media Encoder score wasn't much better, at 2:45. To put this in perspective, even dual-core systems at the $500 price point can do the WME task at under 1:50 and the Photoshop test at just over a minute. The T180 will just about pass muster if your media needs are limited to consumption, but it's a slow system if you're doing any sort of content creation (say, transcoding a video for YouTube or posting on your Web site).

Compared with similar systems,  the T180 comes across as a step backwards. The Microcenter V300 was able to perform much better on Photoshop (1:59) than the T180. I would guess the V300's scores were helped by its Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processor. The V300's WME score was virtually the same as the T180's, at 2:47. Of course, the T180 does have features that the V300 lacks, such as a media card reader.

If you must come in at under $400 (before monitor), the Acer Aspire T180 can fill a need, especially if you're looking to replace an old Pentium II- or III-powered PC. But with the Internet having become a richer multimedia environment, the Aspire T180 will feel unbearably slow. Take my advice and shell out a little more for a much better system with which you can be happy.  Come inside, look around, you can find a cheap desktop computer you will be satisfied to fire up.

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