Acer Aspire iDea 500 review

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5.1

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Average user rating from 15 users

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Acer Aspire iDea 500 user reviews

November 21, 2006

Posted by: David Marc

"Good looking and does the job of a media hub for my living room. Excellent Windows Media Centre"

What I like:

Accessing all of my TV, video and music and photos in one place

What I don't like:

Easy enough setup but took a long time as you have to burn your own backup of Windows

Review:

This is my 3rd attempt at centring all of my media in one place. First I had a Showcentre media hub, which didn't do the job. Then streaming media to an Xbox 360 via the extender, which only likes .wmv and programs such as transcode often fall over. To my surprise the Acer Idea 500 works as it should! Streams video from another PCs in my home if I want it to and no matter what format it's been encoded in.

Setup via HDMI to an LCD TV, the media centre functions of the system work well and I have had no problem setting up Freeview. I did read some negative posts about HDMI but for me it was a breeze, told the machine I wanted HDMI as my output method and there it was and no problems losing HDMI when reset.

No problems with the remote for media centre, works as it should.

The keyboard that comes with the machine has a laptop-style pad instead of mouse and this is a great way of getting around the normal windows interface.

For my needs this machine is great, I want to access my media via the dedicated Windows Media interface and will not really be dropping back to the standard XP or Vista interface to check emails and do any serious web surfing.

If you do drop back there is some over scanning that cannot be rectified, it states this clearly in the instruction manual.