Acer Aspire T671

I would rate this as excellent, but it comes with Vista! Which I absolutely hate! It is power hungry, and even with pretty reasonable specs on this machine, it just slows it all down far more than I know XP would have done.

As for the machine itself, once again Acer come up with a lovely budget machine! Its got Duo core, so that helps, but if your expecting a machine to handle pretty heavy gaming applications, then this isn't really your machine, but then it is budget end of the market and so in that scale does perform well.

I do a lot of graphic design work, and despite having Vista, I haven't found it slowing down too much with several applications open at once.
I like the design and its nice and compact. Its easy to use and everything works pretty much as you would expect it to.

We've had Acers before, and I am pleased to note one previous "fault" they all seemed to have was noisy start up. This machine doesn't give that same issue any more which is nice to note. It didn't affect performance or reliability at all, but was just annoying to hear as you powered up.
It doesn't seem particularly noisy while operating and also seems to run without getting too hot. Fan noise is minimal.

No monitor, but we've picked up a flat monitor for £50-00 that does the job we wanted, so its still a good buy.
Have also done all we wanted when burning DVD's with no real drop in performance.

We plan to add additional RAM in the next few weeks to try and help with the problems we get with Vista and that should solve it.

I would also though say it might be worth a look at Dell machines who are the closest competitors to Acer in this instance, but these machines are worthy of serious consideration.

Because Acer has independent agents working for it, we've also never had a problem over support. Its just been a case of pop it across to our local independent computer shop to deal with as they are Acer agents.