Jolt Country

I went and bought the Acer, it was $329 plus tax, so it was about $350. Picked it up along with a Tenda wireless adapter (and Tenda has made their already tiny adapter even smaller), it's about twice as long as a quarter. Literally, the adapter is only a little larger than my thumbnail.

I bought a set of $6 speakers only to discover that the machine comes with speakers, which surprised me. It's got an NVIDIA graphics card, runs a fairly good resolution on my monitor, and when I connected it to my KVM I can continue to switch between existing machines.

Unpacked the last remaining KVM cable, which connects the Video, USB keyboard and USB mouse on the other three machines, plugged it in to slot 4, then plugged the video and single USB connector into the back of the computer. Used one more USB connector for power for the Acer speakers.

Turned it on, it smoked and caught fire, destroying several hundred dollars worth of equipment. No, actually it came up just fine, asked me to affirm that I agree to give my immortal soul to them under the terms of their EULAs, and the computer started up. Asks for a user name and computer name. Everything was okay except - since there was no Internet connection - I can't change Workgroup yet.

First thing I did was to install the Tenda wireless adapter and the management software. Comes up and I tell it to select my wireless (there are two other places that have wireless but both are secured).

This message is being typed from the Acer, which I have given the name of Quadcore. Interesting to bring up Task Manager, Click on the Performance tab and see 4 CPU windows!

What tweaks? Well, the first thing I did was bring up Internet Explorer, went to mozilla.com, downloaded and installed Firefox and I'm using it now. The machine has 4 GB of memory built in. So I went to Virtual Memory settings and change the paging from about 3.2 GB to fixed 6 GB - 6 GB minimum, 6 GB Maximum which was slightly above the recommended max of about 5.2G. It's something I've done for a long time that I think helps performance, by creating a fixed paging area so windows doesn't have to bother releasing disk space. (Since the drive has 750 GB it makes sense not to bother reducing swap space.)

Using Firefox Sync I was able to transfer all my bookmarks over through the cloud.

Changed the workgroup from "Workgroup" to the one I use ("Robinson"). Did a reboot and it shuts down and starts back up faster than my other machine. It's running Windows 7 Home Premium.

I don't think building my own machine is necessarily a good idea over buying a refurbished machine. For one thing, I don't have to put anything together, the machine is already set up and working, and plus, I've built a machine before, for what I want to do I suspect pre-built is going to be less expensive than build-it-myself. And I don't need to get tools and everything else.

Also, this Acer is small. It's about the same length from front to back as the Optiplex, but it's even thinner,. Front panel access to 2 USB ports, speaker and headphones, plus a media reader, has a fold-open cover. It's jet black, and the power button is on the top of the machine.

I forgot to mention when I posted this, the Acer only weighs 12 pounds. In the box, it's 17 pounds. This is a lot less than the 26 pounds any of the other machines weigh, which is important for a man with bad hands such as myself.

I bought the computer, a network adapter, a set of speakers, a $14 book about Steve Jobs (impulse item), a bottle of soda (which got lost when the bag broke), and Duke Nukem Forever, and with tax it was $406, which was what I figured (I expected it to be about $400 but I didn't expect the book.)

Let's see what will I need to install? Steam, Sketchup, VLC, YouTube Downloader, Open Office and/or Libre Office, Word Perfect 8, Free Pascal and Lazarus, Free Basic, FileZilla. That will give me similar software setup on both machines, although I have no intention of disconnecting the Optiplex which already has these and has 1.4 TB of free space, so it's going to become my file server as well.

Of course, I still have DNF to install, which was the whole point of buying a new machine.

I'm thinking, I'm going to run a resize program to change the partitions on this to put in, say, a 100 GB for Linux so I can use it on the machine as well. Have to figure out how to set dual boot up properly, but might as well do it now while the drive is almost pristine and I don't have to do much reorg to get a clean partition plus one for swap space.

I went to network, found my documents folder, went to the music videos folder, created a shortcut, and when I double clicked on one, it found it and plays it from the Optiplex on QuadCore. So it looks like everything works okay.

"Do you feel the same, or am I only dreaming?
Is this burning, An Eternal Flame?"
- The Bangles (From my audio)

DON'T DROP IT!!

I own one Acer tower, one Acer netbook, and two Acer laptops.

On my main laptop, a faint horizontal line has formed on the screen, and the "/" key is starting to flake out. The line is only visible against dark backgrounds and the "/" key works if you hit it hard, so I'm still fairly satisfied. I don't remember how long ago I bought this laptop, but it shipped with Windows 7 so it's not THAT old. 3 or 4 years, maybe.

The whole "brand X is better than brand Y" argument for OEM computers is still unclear to me... Basically, everyone uses the same components and the only differing factors are price, level / quality of support, and how shiny the case is. Trying to define what a "refurbished" system constitutes is even more weird, because it could have been sent back for any single component and is now being sold used, because something was swapped out (besides the monitor, are there any components in a PC that can be "fixed" in the old, swapping out fuses sort of idea?)

So yes... Whatever.

There are varying statistics, but according to both of the places I've bought refurb computer from (TigerDirect and Best Buy), a significant percentage of items returned and later sold as refurbs were returned for non-failure reasons. In other words, they original owner didn't like the color, couldn't afford the payments, etc. I have also read that the refurb checklist is stricter than the original sale checklist, meaning that you have better odds of getting a working refurb than you do a brand new unit.

And yeah, if something was really wrong, there's no guy in the back room with a screwdriver and a soldering iron fixing bad screens or hard drives. It's swap and ship.

For what it's worth, the only reason I went with Acer was (at the time) they had both Windows and Linux drivers online available for download, which allowed me to easily reload my netbook and install Ubuntu on it.