Acer RC900

The idea of moving the PC into the living room is gaining momentum, but it's not all about Microsoft's Media Center edition of Windows XP. For the RC900, Acer has decided to have stab at the concept itself.

It starts out well with a jog shuttle and LCD. Twist the jog and the display reads the mode that PC will operate in - PC, TV, FM radio or picture view mode. But the trouble is that this intuitive idea is mounted on top of a bog-standard PC tower.

It's quite ugly and hardly suited to a front room, despite Acer's best attempts to tidy up the front of the case. Flimsy panels disguise the DVD +/-RW and DVD-Rom drives, while a sliding panel that would be more at home on a cheap breadbin keeps the USB, Firewire and multi-card reader out of site.

If the aesthetics are anything to complain about, then using the PC will soon make you forget all of those problems. Once in Windows using the jog shuttle to change mode, such as to TV, puts the PC into hibernate, then it reboots, starts loading Windows again and finally starts the TV application in a kind of standalone mode.

The same process happens in reverse when switching back to the PC. This takes a long time and lacks the simplicity of similar PCs such as Hi-Grade's Xperian. Acer provides a remote control, so you can at least do all of this mode switching from the comfort of an armchair. However, it lacks advanced controls, such as record or timeshifting for TV. It's not that those functions don't exist, but you need to manually launch the TV application in Windows and select all the advanced features from there. That said, the picture and sound playing applications are simple to use and give the RC900 more scope than just another desktop PC.

We also ran into trouble using the Restore CDs function. After booting into the recovery interface the mouse moves slower than a man on stilts wading through a vat of treacle, which makes it very difficult to select anything. After all that, the process halted after copying five per cent of the files.

As a regular desktop PC the specs aren't bad. A 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading sits at its heart backed up by 512MB of DDR Ram. There are three free memory slots and the Intel 865G chipset supports up to 4GB of Ram.

The 128MB Nvidia Geforce FX5200 provides reasonable 3D graphics, but with a 3Dmark 2001 score of 7,998 don't expect to blast your way though the most demanding latest games. Sysmark refused to run on the PC, which we put down to the software Acer uses for its extra media facilities.

The RC900 ships with an 80GB hard disk, which should cover most people's storage requirements. An average bundle of software is preloaded on the PC including Norton Antivirus 2003, Power DVD and a CD/DVD burning application.

Opening the case reveals a tidy build with easy access to all the major components. There aren't any free external drive bays, although there's room to fit another hard disk if you need more space. Out of the three PCI slots only one is available for use, as the TV Card blocks the slot below it.

The price doesn't include a monitor, presumably because Acer would like to see the RC900 sit in the front room connected to a TV. The PC's not an entire washout but the media side needs more work, so that it's not such a chore changing between entertainment and the PC.

A friendlier case wouldn't go amiss and might tempt people into choosing this PC over the plethora of Media Center PCs. As it stands, it's quite a lot of money to pay for PC with average performance and components. In most cases you're better off spending your hard-earned cash elsewhere.

Contact: Acer 0870 900 2237
www.acer.co.uk

Specifications:

• Windows XP Home
• P4 2.8GHz
• 512MB DDR
• Intel 865G
• 80GB hard disk
• DVD-Rom
• DVD +/-RW
• Nvidia Geforce FX5200
• Norton Anti-virus 2003, PowerDVD
• 1yr warranty