Living with an Acer Aspire Revo…
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now, I brought a Revo about 6 months ago and have been using it as the “Kitchen PC” ever since. I’ve not made many major configurations to the machine since purchase. It still run’s Windows 7 OS and I’ve not modded the network card or installed an external wireless antenna, even though I would say wireless signal is the device’s biggest issue. I’ve found the wireless card is very inefficient, even sitting right next to a router, it’ll still only get bizarrely 4 bars maximum. This has a knock on effect as to the way it’s being used. The whole point as I see it about having a Revo computer is to serve content from either a central server (in our case the HTPC in the living room), or to stream content available from the web. This is while it’s ideal as a Kitchin, Bedroom or living room computer. The device works well when delivering low bitrate content (mp3, 320/480 etc.) but goes into proper meltdown if you try anything higher. This is kinda frustrating, I’ve tried The Matrix I have in 1080p super-goodness and in all honesty it trys really really hard to play the movie, but when it comes to scenes say like the lobby shoot-out, it’s like watching “bullet time, in bullet time * 10” the bitrate just can’t keep up. It’s strange, as you would think this would be the same with HD content from sources like the BBC iPlayer’s HD service, but alas.. these just don’t play at all unless you directly wire the device into the router. Now I’m done with the crappyness for a moment, let me tell you about how useful a device like this can be. The answer: Boxee. What an amazing application this is. It turns the whole computer into a HTPC style super device and it’s causing a few waves in the states as to how online content is actually being delivered to people’s TV’s rather than just their computer screen. With Boxee, firstly you arrange all your sources for music, television and movies and let the software just kick it.. 2 hours later (I have a lot of content), it’ll ask you to identify everything it could not auto-detect. Which in my case was less than 5% of the 4TB of content held around the house. So once you’ve setup your sources, Boxee is excellent in providing online links to episodes of TV programs you’re interested in, but don’t currently have locally. If you’re American, this is awesome as Hulu and Fox Online will provide all the content (ad spliced) available for streaming. If you in the UK however… non of this content will play, you suck, period. Well almost :) As with anything techie, there is always a solution.. in this case it’s VPN. Now depending how flush you are you could fork out for a US geo-located server, which acts as a proxy and VPN. My preferred solution is to buy a subscription to a geo-located VPN service. These have been designed mainly to get round China’s firewall and other such nasty stuff, but they also act as a great way to bounce content from one location via another if you get my meaning. So, if you’re thinking about buying a Revo. Or any other (non-Apple) based nettop here are my top five suggestions: In conclusion, the nettop is Ace(r), you can VESA plug it straight into the back of your fancy LCD TV and enjoy all that Internet goodness via your HDMI link. Image nabbed from http://www.testfreaks.com/desktop-computers/acer-aspire-revo-r3600/ If you’re like me and already have that solution, then the nettop acts as a great accompaniment to your existing home theatre solution.
