Right now I'm running on an HP Pavilion a620n. The thing is 7 years old, but it's pretty durable; except for some occasional lag, it has remained functional the entire time. The fact that is has lasted 7 years is frankly miraculous, to be honest. Most people switch out their computer after 3 or 4. This thing could stop any day; the limited 160gb hard drive is full of crap, the processor is an aged dinosaur, and it's also been irritating me gaming-wise since its video card sucks and I've never been able to scrounge up enough moolah for a decent one.

tldr -> I need a relatively fast computer, preferably around $500 or less, in new condition: I'm not looking to buy somebody's equally aged dinosaur on craigslist.

At the moment, I'm looking to buy this little Acer Aspire. To the untrained and naive eye (mine), it seems too good to be true- 4 gigs of RAM, a 3 Ghz processor, a 2 MB cache, a 1066mb FSB, and an Intel GMA X4500HD video card, all for $350? ($375 with tax, I know :v) Certainly better than my current turtle, which has a pitiful 512 megs or RAM, a 2.2 Ghz processor, 512 KB cache, 400Mhz FSB and some kind of weird UniChrome IGP video card which can't even run Halo. My monitor, keyboard, mouse etc are all fine- the latter two were actually replaced fairly recently- so I'm just looking to buy the CPU itself.



However, I'm hesitant of getting this, mainly because I've never heard of the Acer brand name. It seems to have fairly good reviews wherever I go, but still, I don't want to buy something that might conk out in a week. I especially don't want to buy something only to find that I could have gotten something better for a cheaper price. Thus, I turn to my fellow forumites for advice. Go.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, please don't go "hey just build your own computer man." I know it's probably the cheapest choice, but I frankly don't have time to play hardware engineer- I need something that is reliably made by professionals.

I've heard good things about Acer actually, I believe my friend got a beast of a laptop for somewhere around $800 (I'm talking 8GB of RAM and a beast graphics card and CPU, it was on sale at the time).
As far as that computer goes, looks like a good bargain to me. I was a bit worried when I saw just pentium on it, but I looked it up and it's a decent dual core job. You'd probably want to upgrade the graphics card at your earliest convenience, but for a start it's not bad.

I've heard of Acer, they're a good brand. Snatch that thing up.

I'm running an Acer Aspire 5738G. Cost £600+, 3GB DDR3 RAM, 2.2GHz Dual Core processor, rather good video card. It's about two years old now.
Acer is pretty well known here in the UK.

The only trouble I've seen with Acer-s is that occasionally they want to install all sorts of crap that's supposed to make them go faster. Thankfully Acer invented the "No thanks" button.

Other than that, buy the thing. I'm probably going to get one of these too, as it happens.

Acer sucks at netbooks. I haven't tried their desktops, but man their netbooks blow.

Really? I thought I saw an Acer Eee netbook that out-benchmarked all other netbooks out there. I could be wrong, though.

That's Asus.

Ah. Nevermind me, then.

damn dislexia.

All netbooks blow . Win7 isn't designed to run with that little power/RAM.



I lol'd

Get the most expensive acer you can with your money. You'll get 30ish % more performance than other named brands.

Thanks for the input, guys, I've purchased it and should be able play CC like a man before Christmastime <3

A mod can lock this thread, by the way, it's pretty much served its purpose.

Just wanted to make a final point.

Usually people overlook acers due to them being sort of a nameless brand, but from my experience they are the ones that provide the better performance/cost in both laptops and desktops. It is not uncommon to see a 600$ acer beat every single point a 800$ toshiba or asus as to offer.

Yeah, I found this out rather quickly. This thing usually costs $450, and looking up similar computers on Google (and Newegg) I couldn't find anything with the same basic specs or better (3Ghz processor/4Gbs RAM) for under $600. I was a little suspicious of the brand at first, but Acer seems to be seriously good. Glad I found this little sucker.

uhhh wrong

my netbook runs great w/ windows 7, not slow in the slightest. 4gb RAM. some atom processor. was ~350.

you're not supposed to be playing TF2/similar on a /netbook/ anyways.