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60 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great HTPC, October 17, 2009
This review is from: Acer AspireRevo AR1600-U910H Black/White Desktop PC (Windows XP Home) (Personal Computers)
I know some people will use this aa a small form pc for everyday use, but I'm only reviewing this from a HTPC perspective. Right now its connected to my network wirelessly and Im streaming my movies to my flatscreen tv. Its great for viewing Hi def content, I thought theres no way a processor this slow could ossibly playback through HDMI clearly. I was pleasantly surprised, after a bit of setup it streams ANY format thrown at it through HDMI. I loaded windows vista on this because of windows media center wich really helps with managing all my movies, music and pictures. The only issue is viewing flash video online, dont get me wrong it plays the video reasonably well but you will notice the stuttering at times on the video. Flash currently is not configured to run on these new processors so viewing flash online will be an issue until flash 10.1 wich will be released some time early next year. The processor isnt strong enough to handle high end computing tasks like video editing or photoshop, but this isnt what this pc is made for. Coupple of notes about setup, it comes with windows xp home but that OS may not provide as much sophistication as most people would like, I installed vista on this pc pretty easily. You must have either an external dvd drive or a usb drive with at least 4 giggs of available space. If your using a usb drive you must load the OS dvd on a diferent pc and then copy the files over to the usb drive, afterwards connect to this pc and start setup while in windows xp. Also please remember to load all the drivers needed if you install a new OS. [...]
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52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Second W7MC HTPC plus soooo much more, October 29, 2009
This review is from: Acer AspireRevo AR1600-U910H Black/White Desktop PC (Windows XP Home) (Personal Computers)
This is my third Nvidia Ion setup and I am rather suprised. My other two setups are Atom 330s (which does run a bit faster) not Atom 230s so I was a little apprehensive. I purchased this unit as a second HTPC to hook to a 1080i/720p 36" LCD in our loft. My main HTPC has all of the music, recorded tv, and movies on it's hard drives. I purchased this unit to stream video to over my Home Group (Windows 7 lingo for your secure home network). To start I registered the unit and upgraded it to Windows 7 Home x64 with one of my upgrades from a family pack. This can be easily done by copying the setup disk to an external hard drive and making the drive active. Then just change the bootup options in the BIOS (DEL key) to "Boot from USB" and the rest is a snap. Don't forget to switch it back after your it's first restart. There are detailed instructions on the web if you need help. I upgraded the memory to 2gb for $18 which again was very easy. I really had to search to determine the memory setup out of the box for this unit. It comes with 1gb (all on one SODIMM card) of PC2 DDR2 800 memory. So the upgrade was just an additional 1gb SODIMM card. It took 5 minutes. I also changed the BIOS setting to use 512k of the memory for the GPU instead of 256k. While in the BIOS I set my computer to automatically bootup at 7:00 am. This is one of the big advantages of using an Ion setup, it uses so little power (less than 30 watts) so that you can leave it on all day. Of course, it drops into sleep mode (SP3) when not in use and I turn it off myself at night. I also added a 1gb flash drive and set it up to be used as a FAT32 Ready Boost drive for caching. Just helps it to run a little faster. So my total setup to a Windows 7 Media Center was about $80 and well worth it. It works great on my TV and streams all my content easily over my Gigabit wired home network. With the coming release of Flash 10.1 this system will have no problem with web based HD also. I didn't try 32 bit Windows 7 so I can't say much about it. And this system has to have the extra 1gb to run 64 bit. It is realllllllly slow without it. I did also order a media center remote control for $25 which works great. Get an external DVD drive (or Blu-ray drive), an external data source, and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (I was perfectly fine with the wired version it comes with since my kids will trash it anyway)and you have a very good computer for very little money. These systems have no problem with web surfing or MS Office 2007 so they make great kid/dorm computers. Also, I have no problems with the HDMI output to a Visio LCD. Enjoy!
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I (almost) love my Revo, December 13, 2009
This review is from: Acer AspireRevo AR1600-U910H Black/White Desktop PC (Windows XP Home) (Personal Computers)
I've now had my Revo for 1 month and there are lots of things I like about it and several things I don't like.
Revo is small, quite, low powered and simple. No fan noises nor excessive heat at all. I notice the "thumping" of my external hard drive during seeks more than anything coming out of the Revo.
The ION Graphics and HD 5.1/7.1 sound over HDMI work great (when they work). When running video of any kind, you absolutely need to latest codec's which supports ION. For Flash video, only 10.1 pre-release works. WMP 11; Unbox as well. You can tell it is working by 2 things: no hope of HD video output without it; CPU constantly peaks at 100% without it as seen on the Task Manager on the performance tab. Playing MKV/MP4 on H.264 is generally smooth with some streaming play "pausing" (testing on Amazon On Demand in HD ). Streaming supports up to your 100T speeds through a wired network cable. Anything Hulu runs fine.
I added an external Bluray player which works with my PowerDVD 8 Deluxe [OLD VERSION]8 . Flawless and as good as any Bluray with DTS True HD. Getting 5.1/7.1 sound needs an upgrade though.
Advice: Don't try to upgrade ANY nVidia drivers without planning for a long outage as you most likely will lose your HD Sound. Just google "acer revo no hdmi sound" and you will see others struggling with this. I made the mistake of updated my ION video driver directly from nVidia and lost my sound until I did a "Restore to Factory Settings" operation packaged on a hidden partition on my Revo in order to get HD sound back. The nVidia HD sound device is not selected by default, so you always need to go into the Control Panel -> Sound ... and select it. What happens after I updated my video driver is that no matter what sound drivers I installed (even driver roll back), the nVidia HD device never shows up anymore. A friend told me that I would have needed to uninstall every nVidea driver; do a driver cleanup; then reinstall all of the latest drivers in order to get that to work again. Frankly, I haven't tried this yet as it already sounds really painful.
Haven't tried Linux yet, but tempted to see if that flips me over to loving this device. Otherwise, I can't complain about the price. It brings a PC onto my home theater which is nice for doing email etc. I often debate if I should have gone the other way - bluray plus streaming video support. But then you get locked in to what your bluray will (or will not) support.
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