Acer Aspire iDea 500 review

It's hard TO be a Windows Media Center PC.

You're expected to be an all-singing, all-dancing powerhouse and yet be tiny, silent and stylish. But Acer has nonetheless managed to combine all these elements in the Aspire iDea 500. Dare we say it, it's almost perfect.

Unlike many of its bulky contemporaries, the iDea is exactly the right size to fit into a hi-fi stack. It should also fit into most TV furniture and because it's designed to expel heat from the sides and back, you can put other equipment on top without worries about overheating.

The iDea has an impressive range of inputs and outputs to connect it to your existing setup, from high-end component video, to composite, S-Video and SCART outputs, as well as all the audio connections you could need. If you're using an LCD TV, there's a DVI port, as well as an HDMI connector - the cutting-edge socket found on the latest HD TVs. Unlike most standards, this keeps both video and audio as digital signals, rather than converting them to analogue and then back again, thus keeping quality as high as possible. There's also HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) built in, so as long as you also have a compatible TV, the iDea will handle encrypted high-definition video.

Two TV tuners

Inside, there's a dual-digital TV tuner, which means you can watch one Freeview channel and record the other, or record both. There's also an FM radio tuner built in and infrared outputs to control set-top boxes, although the latter can be difficult to get working. We like the fact that there's just a single input for the TV tuners (and an output to pass the signal on to other equipment), plus another for the FM aerial. Not only is it easier to set up, but it also keeps things tidy.

The usual array of desktop PC connectors is missing - there are no serial or parallel ports, for example - but the two FireWire ports and four USB ports are more than enough. There's a radio transmitter already embedded for use with the comfortable (if slightly flimsy) keyboard, which also contains a trackpad to negate the need for a mouse. There's also an infrared receiver on the front for the remote control and even a memory card reader under the front panel for digital camera cards. You won't need to add network hardware either, as there's both wired and wireless networking built in, complete with an antenna at the back.

Despite Intel's best intention's, the Viiv badge on the front of the Aspire doesn't mean much, but it does mean that you get a Core Duo processor - not to be confused with the more recent Core 2 Duo. Although it's a laptop processor, the Core Duo chip is more than a match for many desktop processors and both our benchmarking and everyday use showed it to be adequate for even demanding tasks. It also consumes much less power than most processors, which means lower running costs and much less noisy cooling. The power supply fan will occasionally spin up when the PC is working particularly hard, but otherwise, you'll hear it only if you put your ear to it.

We can forgive the slightly cheap-feeling keyboard and occasional whooshing noise the power supply makes, and our other complaints are fairly minor. The 250GB hard disk will soon fill up with lots of TV recordings, but you can easily add an external hard disk. The slot-loading DVD writer supports just about every format too, so you can burn up to 8GB of data in one go.

The only part that leaves us cold is the paltry one-year warranty - particularly disappointing on a cutting-edge consumer device such as this. An extra three years will cost you £99. Bearing that it mind, this is still a lot of PC for the money and a brilliantly executed media-centre PC - maybe even the best yet. As such, it's all enough to earn it a Best Buy award.

Author: RB