Review of Acer Aspire T180 Desktop PC Bundle

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.