All About Computer

The Acer Revo R3600 is a slightly odd kettle of fish and in some ways is a solution looking for a problem!
The original desktop PC configuration; Base unit, wired keyboard and mouse, and a monitor hasn’t changed much in 25 years – unless you count putting the base unit on it’s side!

A number of notable exceptions have been to create the ‘all in one PC’ which unite the processor and display – most notably the original iMac in the 1990s – Sony dabbled with the idea of an entertainment center (sic) – one of which I use as my main PC, but it still relied upon the idea of a separate unit for doing essentially ‘PC’ stuff, largely unrelated to any other kit you may already have.
Acer have responded to this by taking a sideways look and coming up with the ‘nettop’ PC.

In terms of hardware, it owes rather more to the currently very trendy ultra-portable ‘mini PC’s known as ‘netbooks’ – except this one does away with the built in keyboard mouse and screen.
Why? – good question!

Well; the reason is often staring you in the face every day in the living room!
The astonishingly quick adoption of relatively cheap flat screen ‘HD-ready’ televisions has meant that many of us already have all the display equipment we need!
The reason is that the Acer Revo R3600 comes with standard SVGA and HDMI connectors, and so can be connected to almost any flat screen TV sold in the past few years.

Still want to use a ‘conventional’ LCD monitor? – Acer has another trick up it’s corporate sleeve; you can get an adapter which allows you to bolt their tiny computer to the back of many monitors to make a passable Kiosk machine!
Several flavours of the R3600 exist;

The base model with one gig of RAM and ‘built in ‘Linux’
The earliest models had minimal disk storage, and essentially relied on flash memory to save your stuff - fine for shortcuts, but not especially well suited to storing media.

This model was (and to an extent still is) well suited to using it as an internet terminal, but don’t expect a great deal more.
The ‘Linux’ supplied is in fact a graphical shell built into the BIOS - for those of you who just glazed over – let me explain;

To do anything with a computer – you need an Operating System – Microsoft Windows being the most widely known example – Microsoft developed Windows from ideas they took from IBM, who in turn developed OS/2 in response to Apple – who in turn stole the idea from Xerox.
Linux started life as a homebrew project to reproduce the functionality of the Unix operating system, originally developed on surplus minicomputer hardware, fast forward 30 years and it now represents the most widely used graphical interface which doesn’t come from Microsoft.

Anyhow – the Linux you get with the R3600 is a ‘cut down’ version and you don’t get the full functionality of a ‘proper’ distribution. Ubuntu or Redhat this isn’t!
There’s a couple of other variants of the R3600 – one comes with ‘corded’ mouse and keyboard and runs Wiindows Vista, and the other has wireless keyboard and mouse, and has a game controller not entirely different from a Nintendo Wii.

It's this model I bought.
It also comes with a 160Gb hard drive installed, Wireless LAN and Windows Vista (home).

The main reason for my buying this system was to allow me to surf the web from my couch, as well as use the BBC iPlayer (a little on this later).
The Analogue VGA connection worked OK on my Sony 46” TV, but the number of screen resolutions and frequencies was a bit limited. I also noticed flickers on screen when the hard drive kicked in.

Far better results were obtained using the HDMI port.
The Windows system comes with a number of bundled software titles including an
Office 2007 trial, a virus checker, MS Works and so on (to be honest I removed these almost immediately and installed AVG Antivirus, which is free, and OpenOffice)

The 2Gb of RAM provides sufficient memory to allow single applications to run reasonably quickly, but perhaps due to it running VISTA – multitasking is a bit slow.
I was a little disappointed to find that it didn’t have a built in DVD drive, although a SATA and 6 USB ports on the outside of the system would allow you to connect an external device. Especially frustrating was the fact that you NEED an external drive to create your recovery disks (how much extra would supplying the disks have cost?)

One of the main uses of the machine was going to be as a BBC iPlayer console – the system uses an NVIDIA chipset, and whilst just about able to cope at standard resolution, initially at least, the machine struggled to deliver full screen programming – this is more to the limitations of the Flash Player not being optimised for the chips, although a recent upgrade patch seems to have improved matters.
I’ve read claims that this is capable of delivering HD performance with external BluRay disk drives, I can only suggest that given the iPlayer performance I remain slightly unconvinced!

The ‘Atom’ processor is primarily designed to provide basic computing capability at minimal power levels, and as a result, the system runs almost silently – useful for Media based applications.
It’s pretty impressive as a ‘media jukebox’ – allowing me to listen to free music on demand via ‘Spotify’.

The machine is always going to have the accusation of being a ‘niche computer’ – it has some nice touches such as a memory card reader (unfortunately not supporting SDHC format) an Ethernet port as well as Firewire, but I wouldn’t immediately have suggested it was ideal for video post-production.
2D graphics are fine, although this is far from the specification you’d need for the latest 3d gaming titles, but as far as a basic web surfer, email client and word processor it performs admirably.
I’d have happily spent another £50 for an internal DVD burner.

How well this performs as a PC is largely down to your expectations – as a ‘second machine’ it ticks all the boxes, and comes in a remarkably small package, so within the initial limitations it has I’d have no hesitation in suggesting that dor £250 this was an excellent machine.