THe Acer Aspire T180 Desktop bundle has a relatively inexpensive purchase price of only $448 plus tax at Walmart. The desktop bundle consists of a keyboard, mouse, side speakers, monitor, and computer tower with rewriteable DVD Rom, a 9-1 card reader, a one year warranty and is your basic starter-type package.
Many customers choose the Acer Aspire T180 after only five minutes of comparing the “on-shelf” competition and their prices. But what exactly are these compulsive buyers buying into? Is the Acer Aspire T180 a great package at a great price, or a just a low priced product?
The black and silver tower is minimally stylish espescially when compared to the style of the high priced competion. But don’t be too quick to judge a book by its cover. The desktop specifications include AMD Athlon 64 3800, 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM, a 160GB SATA hard drive, a 56k modem and a DVD +/- RW (double-layer). So the Aspire is far from being slow or obselete.
The Acer mouse is a black standard roller mouse with scrolling wheel. The Acer keyboard is a black, very standard keyboard. The keyboard does come with a plastic peice that connects to the front of the keyboard to elongate it for style and to help hold the wrists up. The stylish black and silver side speakers stand less than seven inches tall and give a nice clean sound.
The monitor is the Acer 17″ TFT LCD. This thin screen has a 1280 x 1024 native resolution with a 500:1 contrast ratio. The Acer screen combines with NVIDIA GeForce 6100 to produce good-looking pictures and smooth graphics.
Windows Vista Home Basic is preinstalled and is reccommended by Acer. Acer does include Windows Anytime Upgrade software to help customers easily upgrade to higher levels of Windows Vista, although its use is not required to upgrade.
The Acer Empowering Technology software that is also pre-installed is a very nice bonus. The eMode section is a convenient stop for using the TV, music, iPods, and movie functions. eMode Management allows users to “slide over” to the next device wanted without taking time to search and initiate software.
But it is the eData Security Management that is the real gem. eData Security Management encrypts your personal and sensitive data files so that no one but the password holder can access them. Information theives as well as nosy family and aquaintences will hit a brick wall when trying to snoop on the Acer Aspire T180, as long as the eData Security Management is enabled.
The only fault with the eData Security Management system is that a file that has been encrypted once cannot be encrypted again since the file is marked as read only. So for example, a Wordpad file that is being used as a diary will have to be renamed everytime it is saved and then encrypted. The name can be simply “Diary” each time though because the file name is slightly changed during the encryption process. However, it is important to delete the oldest file to prevent a future mixup.
The Acer Aspire T180 seems to be a good option for customers who want a basic computer system. Unlike HP computers which have questionable software such as HP Updates, the Aspire model seems to be “extra” software free. A clean slate helps to prevent software conflicts, which is why many consumers are purchasing and installing a clean copy of Windows in certain brands of computers.
