Acer Aspire T180 Review

Overall Rating

Cheapest new dual-core PC I could find. At front there are 9 x card slots + 2 x USB 2.0 connectors and audio in/out sockets, which is good. Easy access to inside with thumbscrews and latch system. Case has perforated panel on one side to improve airflow and keep temperature down. Pc is very quiet in operation. Total hard drive capacity = 160gb which comes pre-partitioned with C and D drives an equal 70gb approx.

Case a bit cheap and nasty: have to be very careful not to bend the tabs when replacing removable side panel. Keyboard and mouse are both extremely cheap and only fit for the dustbin! 2.1 speakers are probably average but produce nowhere as good sound as did my old Packard Bell.

Several problems on very first boot up were reported by Vista's Problems and Solutions facility. And these are repeated every time I have restored the PC to factory settings.

Internet Explorer 7 crashed constantly after first boot up, so had to restore PC to factory settings. After that, various programs still failed to respond on a regular basis - and when they did, I could not invoke Task Manager to close them - so restored to factory settings again. Still had problems so was advised by Acer to restore to factory settings again - but this time directly from the hidden partition and NOT from the Restore Disk I had made with Acer's Empowering Technology, as that might be faulty.

User manual very basic indeed. No motherboard manual available, even from Acer, which makes upgrading that much harder and more uncertain.

Has an empty hard drive bay - but the only SATA cable and connector from PSU is already attached to installed hard drive!

PSU only 300-350watts which is not really powerful enough to run this PC plus a couple of non-powered peripherals, like cameras, webcams, non-powered speakers, etc.

Total RAM is 1048gb but despite all the claims that with dual-core technology you will be able to run two or more these power hungry programs together without noticing any difference in speed/performance, in my experience you will NOT be able to do so unless you add considerably more RAM to this system!

Plus as with most bargain PC's this one comes pre-installed with a whole host of Acer software - that one cannot even access directly or find out from Acer precisely what they do or why they are even necessary!

I find the general performance and reliability of the Acer Aspire T180 PC Desktop very disappointing indeed! If only I could have afforded to spend a little more, I would much rather have purchased a Hewlett Packard, a Packard Bell or even a Futjitsu Siemens PC. I would not recommend this Acer Aspire T180 to my worse enemy let alone to any of my friends!