Home > Consumer Reviews > Acer Aspire SA90 Desktop PC, Intel Celeron E2160 Dual Core, 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD

I had no problems with this machine, i plugged the cables from my old machine into it and it started with no problems. When it turned up it had a dual core 2 pentium and not the advertised celeron so bonus! Also instead of the NVIDIA G7300SE it turned up with an ATI radeon HD2400 pro, not sure what difference that will make but at least it's a DX 10 compatable card! When running the standard 1GB of ram it was fine for surfing the net, but did need more oomph for doing more memory intensive things. After buying 2GB of memory there werent really any problems (for less than £30) Have just bought another 2GB so it should now fly! lol
At the end of the day, you need to remember that this machine costs less than £200. Upgrading is always part of a PC process, spend another £30 and you have a very capable machine.
The only things it doesnt come with is a monitor or speakers.

The model I actually received after ordering from this Amazon.co.uk page is the SA90-LB7H, which has an Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160 CPU, a 250 Gb SATA hard disc, 1 Gb DDRII RAM, a DVD+/-RW double layer optical drive, an ATI Radeon HD2400 Pro 128 Mb graphics card and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. Also included is a keyboard and ball mouse, but no speakers.

After reading some of the reviews here I expected Vista to run very slowly indeed on this model, but actually the performance with the supplied 1 Gb RAM is not too bad, certainly fine for use as a family PC for Web browsing, using Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works, and for playing games such as The Sims2 (my children took little time loading that). If the PC were going to be used by a 'power user' then I would recommend adding another 1 Gb of RAM, or alternatively wiping Vista and loading Linux which would fly on a PC of this specification.

Being an Acer product, the build quality is good although the keyboard feels a little flimsy (it performs fine so far, though). My only quibble is with the documentation, or rather the lack of it. The only documents supplied were a warranty booklet, a safety notes booklet and a single-sheet "User Quick Reference Manual" -- hardly a manual -- which is not particularly helpful or accurate. For example it shows the monitor plugged into a vertical VGA socket about half way up the back of the case; however the unit I received also has a horizontal VGA socket near the bottom at the back of the case (a separate video card) and it is that socket that has to be used. There is also a sealed DVD case entitled "Upgrade your Windows Vista Experience" without any explanation as to what precisely this is supposed to be for, and a couple of DVDs labelled "Blank recovery DVD", again without any explanation as to what to do with them.

Getting the PC up and running was straightforward: basically plugging everything in, including the Ethernet cable connected to my ADSL router even though the "User Quick Reference Manual" did not mention this (I assume an Internet connection is required in order for automatic registration of Windows Vista to proceed), switching it on and following the prompts on screen.

However, a day after delivery the optical drive stopped working. Nothing to do with the hardware, but a bug ("feature") in Windows Vista (also a problem in Windows XP) which I was able to resolve after a bit of searching on the Web. The solution is given in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 929461 and various technical forums on the Web. The solution recommended (to edit the Registry and delete two entries UpperFilters and LowerFilters for a particular subkey) is unnecessarily drastic: I just emptied the contents of the the LowerFilters entry rather than deleting the entry itself. The LowerFilters entry was "Pfc" and the UpperFilters entry is "NTIDrvr", so I just removed the "Pfc" (otherwise I assume the installed NTI CD & DVD-Maker 7 application would no longer work). Anyway, this fix to the Windows Vista Registry worked fine, but it's a pity that the user has to do this, although not a fault of Acer but a shortcoming of Windows Vista.

All things considered I'll give this product 4 stars. Had the documentation been better and had Windows Vista not been problematic and a tad sluggish starting up (not really Acer's fault) then I would have gone for 5 stars. However, for the price -- just a few pounds under GBP 200 -- it's difficult to fault this PC, which I think is good value for money and would be ideal if you are looking for a PC to run Windows XP or Linux. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll add another 1 Gb of RAM to give Vista a boost but, for the time being, it's fine for family use.

I ordered one of these and once I ditched Vista and put XP MCE on it and put 2GB of RAM (£30) and it runs brilliantly.

Firstly no problems with the delivery or the ordering process, however it's when I got this machine home my problems began. As described in an earlier review when I first switched on the PC would not accept my monitor though the trick with F8 did the trick on startup.
Things went ok with printer connection which was seemless - the machine was quiet, Pentium instead of Celeron and reasonably quiet.
My problems began with the broadband modem, whose installation disc would not run properly (was fine on my old XP machine) anyway went onto website to get driver data to use on Vista which I installed - despite this the PC refused to acknowledge my modem's existence so thought sod it will get one from PC World that works with Vista - no such luck and neither Tiscali nor Netgear can resolve the problem. Suffice to say will be calling Amazon shortly to arrange collection and am extremely disappointed.

Very disappointed with this machine - it is slower than 6 year old PIII machine running Windows XP. Surfing the web on it on dial up is excrutiatingly slow and even my 7 year old son moans about it. Today I took it to Acer Service who told me that the standard memory capacity isn't up to the job of running Windows Vista. Even though this is a cheap machine and one should not expect much at such and entry level price, why on earth are Acer proudly plugging this machine as having Vista when the hardware barely supports it? Our only option is to put another one and a half gigabyte of memory in it to bring the speed up to scratch. In hindsight, I wish I had coughed up a bit more for a better machine. The guy at Acer told me it would be better running Windows XP, but when I asked asked if I could downgrade to that, he told me the drivers in the machine would not work with XP! This just goes to show that in the world of computers, you certainly do get what you pay for...