The Acer Aspire T135 series provides savvy consumers with a complete desktop solution, packed with performance, expandability and functionality. All in all, it represents an excellent value.
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I bought this computer a few months ago for only £235 including VAT and delivery, which was perfect for me seeing as i'm a student and strapped for cash at the moment :D
I only got 256Mb of RAM for the price, which was a bit of a downer, especially when 64mb is taken up by the onboard graphics, however i had a Radeon 9550 graphics card to slot into the agp8x slot to free up that 64mb and increase performance, and it's been fine since then.
I used to play games with the stock specifications and the added graphics card, and games such as counter-strike and max payne 2 were running happily on near-full specifications which looked great. The computer struggles slightly with higher-end games such as farcry though. I stopped gaming though (due to a backlog of work :D) and moved onto what i bought the computer for, which was working.
The computer can easily handle powerful packages such as photoshop cs2, although i would reccomend closing other applications to be safe, as i sometimes got warnings about the virtual memory when i was editing and my antivirus software was scanning or some other cpu-intensive activity was taking place.
The case temperature does get very hot, so i installed two 8cm case fans in order to create some airflow. This brought the case temperature down by 10deg. and the cpu temperature dropped by 5 degrees (celsius). I think this is the limit to the Power supply though; adding anything else to the pc would probably kill it off but it's surviving for now.
The computer is very speedy and easy to set up. I managed to buy a 17" TFT monitor off a mate for £40 so in all my pc cost £305 (including gfx card and fans), and it's great value for the price.
Acer have made it very easy to overclock the CPU and RAM speeds via the BIOS, and my computer easily handles an increase from the 200Mhz sidebus up to 225Mhz, which brought the CPU speed up to 2.0Ghz without any increase in temperature or instability. However i would reccomend further cooling and a bigger power supply just to be safe if you want to take it further than this.
The only downside to this PC (and i'm not sure if it's just my pc here or all of them) is that the Hard Disk is very noisy at times. It really is quite noisy, especially when scanning or transferring files, and seeing as my pc only has 256mb of ram it uses the hard disk more. However, it is easy to drown out the sound of the HD, i just put the tower in a cupboard and i put music on whilst i'm using the pc.
The onboard Realtek AC97 audio controller is very good; what many people don't realise is that you can configure the 3 ports to incorporate surround sound without buying an expensive sound card. I did this and hooked my PC up to my Stereo system so i get really good quality sound from my PC. The speakers supplied are tinny and small which i hated as i play a lot of music on my pc, and the keyboard and mouse, whilst you can cope with them, aren't brilliant; the keyboard is really awkward to type with and the mouse can stick a bit, so i nicked my little brother's wireless mouse and keyboard (£15 from a pc shop) which fixed that problem.
So in conclusion this PC is great value and a good all-rounder, and if you're thinking of buying it then don't hesitate to do so. just make sure you get 512Mb of ram and try to get some case fans in there as well, it's worth it as it will increase the performance and lifespan of the components.
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Memory / capacity
Good
Range of Extra Features
Satisfactory
Instruction manual
Good
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