All this new fangled technology...

[WPKenny]

My father-in-law has a rather broken computer. He lives about 3hrs drive from us so Lou got a nearby friend to help out. He managed to get rid of the viruses etc from it and hand it back.
Now, Lou's dad had it plugged in on top of the desk just to test it and all was well. Then he decided to move it back to it's proper home in the computer shaped cupboard in the desk but it didn't start up again. When Lou's friend got his hands on it again, he got an impressive shower of sparks in his face as it seems Lou's dad managed to switch the voltage to 110v during the moving process from desk top to cupboard.

Apparently most of it's fried. Not only the PSU but the CPU, mobo, memory etc. However unlikely this seems I won't be able to get down to see him for a few weeks at least so have to take Lou's friend's word for it.

And so to the point.... I was wondering how good these are....
Acer Aspire Revo Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer

If I also suggested an external DVD-RW would he still be able to play his usual Popcap games and hack'n'slash games like Diablo 2?
Can anyone give an example of a game where this machine might start to struggle? i.e. HL2, Command and Conquer 3?

My reasoning is that it's cheap and there's not really much to go wrong with it.

Any thoughts or should I just let this friend of Lou's buy some bits and build him a new system for a couple of hundred quid?

 

[ford prefect]

And so to the point.... I was wondering how good these are....
Acer Aspire Revo Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer

Funnily enough I got one of these for my Father-In-Law from ebuyer about three months ago. My father-In-Law can kill a PC within a week. He follows every shitty little link he can find and opens every piece of spam that comes his way. In short, he is an idiot. He has been using PC's since windows 95 and is still pretty unlear on how to turn one off and on. Copy and paste is also a complete mystery to him. If an AV program or firewall flashes a popup for updates ect, it requires a phone call to me.

I got him one of these, paid for the full acer support package and stuck a sticky note with their support line number on his monitor. I am much happier, he is much happier. Acer are, I daresay are not happy.

If your father-in-law just uses his PC for a bit of surfing, the odd word document and and a bit of email, these are actually very good little machines. I daresay they are ok for fairly basic gaming too, but I haven't tried to be honest. They are very quiet, and seem happy to be left on permanently (at least running Windows 7).

 

[cHodAX]

The Atom is massively underpowered bud, Diablo 2 will be just fine but any game from the last 3-4 years is going to really struggle. You would be better off spending a little more and getting a cheap dual core small form factor PC.

Benchmark Results: Gaming - Review Tom's Hardware : Zotac's Ion Board On Windows 7: Nvidia Re-Arms Intel?s Atom

Those scores are on the dual core Atom 330 as well, you won't even achieve half those scores on the single core 230. Frankly it isn't a viable gaming platform, the Atom 230 has about half the performance of a Celeron clocked the same speed and the Celeron is crippled enough as it is.

All Atom is any use for really is some light media work, web browsing and home applications. I wouldn't bother. You can get something with much much more horsepower for a bit more cash.

 

[cHodAX]

This delivers alot more bang...

Acer Aspire X1301 Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer

About 10 times more cpu horsepower, 4gb of memory. The onboard graphics will run older gamers, it won't be great but it will be viable at low resolutions. 1Tb harddrive as well, alot more PC for 80 quid extra and a DVD burner as well.

 

[soze]

I agree with the manc i have a Revo Dual Care Atom with the Ion graphics and while it is awesome for a media centre it is not really a games machine.