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My Dad, bless him, has managed to destroy our home PC through some email virus. No Task Manager, rgedit, Internet access... even Safe Mode blue screens, though all traces of the virus have been removed.
So it's time for a new one! YUSSS

Our price bracket is between £400-£600, and we want to make sure that the computer we purchase is not going to have then many problems our Dell had. The cheapest, most powerful PC I can find in this range is the Acer Aspire M3641. With a 2.4GHz Quad Processor, 4GB DDR2 memory, a 640GB HDD, a 256mb NVidia GeForce 7100, AND a Blu-Ray player to boot, it's a pretty amazing piece of kit for less than £500.

However, I have absolutely no experience with Acer systems, and was wondering if anyone could shed some light on them: have you met any problems with them? Do they have a good lifespan? Et cetera.

Thanks, any information is appreciated!

I have had good experiences with Acer laptops. I haven't had any experience with Acer desktops but Acer is the third largest computer manufacturer in the world (by sales) after HP and Dell Inc.

On the other hand, it "is not a BBB Accredited Business."

As long as you aren't looking to play any recent games on that, it should be fine (my laptop has better graphics then that I think)

That graphics card is awful. You won't get better than around Half-Life 2 at full spec. If you don't mind, then it'll certainly do the job. I'd recommend finding all those parts on ebay and building it yourself to knock a couple of hundred quid off.

If that makes you uncomfortable, then you could buy the parts independently from somewhere like Newegg (I'm UK too, but this is my favourite site to buy from besides Ebay). Within your original budget you could get:

Quad Core 2.4 - $190
4 Gig Ram - $60
Motherboard - $130
8800 GTS (awesome card!) - $100
PSU - $60
blu-Ray/HD sata drive - $130
1T Hard Drive - $130

Works out as £540.

+ added a much needed boost in graphics capability with the most bang for your buck you can get today.
+ added 360 gigs of disc space.

- £40 over the cost of the Accer.

Bear in mind you could skimp a little more on the PSU and the Mobo (Accer will certainly use lesser quality parts in their machines) and shave that £40 off. Cases can be picked up for tiny amounts, and Accer will no doubt be spending very little on theirs. You could still be within your original budget you could spend a it on a much better case.

Shipping would still be within your budget too.

Even if you don't want to play the latest games, the system I've listed is much better value for your money.

Hope that helps.

Well, I used to have an Acer computer and had a lot of problems with it. It was a pretty cheap computer and was by no means a top-of-the-line computer (it only had a 1.3GHz processor).

Basically, every single process created by Acer failed. The computer would periodically tell me the touch pad failed when it did not, one of the startup tasks which displays text on your screen when you change the volume and such seems to have a random chance to crash on startup, causing it to use 99% CPU which would make the startup take an eternity, so I removed it from startup tasks and made an icon on my desktop to start it instead. After a few years, it's touchpad failed for no reason at all (except maybe just because it's been a few years) and never worked again until a few months later when I turned it on again (I had upgraded before then to a Desktop, but I was using the old laptop on vacation. Now I have a new laptop), it started working again. I think it was a power problem, because the battery was completely dead at the time and I think all power being cut fixed the touchpad somehow. It also developed (well actually it always did this, but the probability of it happening increased with time, and proceeded to increase even after the computer was completely and totally redone) a problem in which when I would put the computer in standby (by any means), it had a chance to go comatose. Basically, some parts of the computer shut down. Others didn't. The light stayed on, but you couldn't turn the computer back on, and some things in the computer would keep going nonstop. The fan, however, would not turn on when the computer was like this, so I would always have to make sure it shut down properly to avoid it overheating. I also somehow managed to overheat the graphics card playing pre-BC WoW (*shrug*), but that was't anything to do with Acer, that was just a crappy graphics card with no fan on it.

You can't say every computer a company makes is going to have a problem just because one computer I bought did, but considering most of the problems were because of Acer software, I'm going to stay faaaar faaar away from Acer. I have an HP laptop, and the only problem (aside from Vista *glare*) I've really been having with it is the stupid auto-play software crashes 90% of the time (I don't even know why that's included. Media Player works fine and doesn't crash 90% of the time), and it's HP driver updates never actually find any new updates when they are available. It also has a semi-ironic thing where being on power-conserving mode makes it take forever and a half to enter standby, thus making it use more power to but the stupid thing in standby then it does on full power mode, but oh well. It's not like it crashes anything... unless you run out of battery waiting for it to standby. That couldn't turn out well)

Thanks, you guys. I'll take all this into consideration.

I've never had a PC capable of running a game before (just ask Yanni about my attempts at TMN!), so anything's a bonus. But I've got my eye on CS:S, GTA4 and Left 4 Dead... There's an HP for £80 more that is practically identical, but that has a 512mb graphics card (that's as specific as it gets), would that be any better when it comes to modern games?

Atob, I've got the experience in building PCs (I built plenty for a solid 2 weeks for my Work Experience way back when) so I have thought about it, but I just don't think I have the time, and I don't want to muck it up! Still, the prices you've listed are amazing, so I might be swayed...

Question... why don't you just format the drive and reinstall Windows?

Come on Ad, it'll take you a couple of hours tops to put the thing together. The extra boost you'll receive for your gaming will be totally worth it!

I'm building this PC (core due 2.4 though, quad is a little overkill unless you're desperate to play Crisis as high as you can, or you're into other heavy multi-media tasking) at xmas and I can't wait!

Ad. wrote:My Dad, bless him, has managed to destroy our home PC through some email virus. No Task Manager, rgedit, Internet access... even Safe Mode blue screens, though all traces of the virus have been removed.
So it's time for a new one!

Sounds more like it's time to reformat the hard drive, but if your old computer couldn't run trackmania nations you're probably due for a new one whether it's broken or not.

atob wrote:Quad Core 2.4 - $190
4 Gig Ram - $60
Motherboard - $130
8800 GTS (awesome card!) - $100
PSU - $60
blu-Ray/HD sata drive - $130
1T Hard Drive - $130

atob has some good ideas, but I'm going to throw mine out there

CPU: I have that CPU, and it is good, but it is also aging and the cheapest quad core intel has, some other options, anything >$80 would be plenty of power really

RAM: good set of sticks, here are some other options (I'm actually going to be buying that last set this summer :D)

Motherboard: atob listed a mobo with integrated graphics, entirely unnecessary, why pay for something you won't be using?
any of these would do

Graphics: the 8800GTS was awesome... roughly 18 months ago, since then better and cheaper parts have come out (especially since he listed the 320mb GTS, which is considerably worse then the 640mb GTS, there is a reason there is only 1 8800GTS 320mb left on newegg)
any of these or any of these would be better (the 9800gt is better then the 9600gt, which would seem obvious, but nvidia's numbers are screwy and random sometimes), just find one at a price you like (if you really want to save some cash this would be able to run any Source game mildly decent (L4D might give it a hard time at higher then 1280x1024 res though...))

PSU: the one atob linked is pretty good, and has an /excellent/ MIR attached to it right now, so these are just some other possibilities (better, but slightly more expensive)

Blue-ray: any of the top four would do fine (atob's is on there)

HD: This is probably the same drive thats in that machine, as it is the only 640gb I have ever seen, and I also happen to own it, excellent drive at an excellent price (the one atob has is good too if you want 1TB)

Case: Wouldn't spend much below $50, this is the case I have, and it is awesome, another excellent option from Cooler Master, basically just find something from this that you like and is in your price range

If you want any more help, get on IRC and I'll provide you with mountains of I-have-done-way-too-much-research-while-building-my-computer knowledge (I'm normally on between 4 and midnight CST, I think thats GMT+7 or so)

If its possible to add another graficcard, it would be a nice comp.

in my experience, Acer's are pretty good machines, and that's a fairly good deal for the price (current rates: 500gbp -> ~750usd). I'll always recommend building yourself, though.