Acer Idea 500 Review
The Acer Idea 500 media center PC released not too long back finally gets the review treatment, and from CNET UK too. Not surprisingly, Acer’s latest attempt at digital convergence gets a thumbs up, with an overall rating of 9.1 out of 10.
A lot of nice stuff was said about the Idea 500, including but not exclusive to its simple, yet well thought out styling, wide variety of connectors and quiet operation. That’s not to say it was seen as the perfect media center PC. Relatively poor 3D graphics performance and its lack of upgradability on the hardware front did pull it down a little.
Overall, CNET deemed that, “The Acer Aspire iDea 500 is the best Media Center PC we’ve seen. Aesthetically it’s inspired by traditional AV equipment, so it’ll sit alongside or replace your existing DVD player without looking out of place. It’s not very upgradeable, but it’s packed with just the right multimedia components to make the most of the Intel Viiv platform.”
FYI, the price range quoted for the Idea 500 was £840 - £898, not too far off from the initial estimate of £899 provided by one of our readers earlier.
October 19th, 2006 03:33
I’ve bought the Idea to use with NTL set top box’s, does it work? NO WAY
I’ve contacted Acer and have been patronized by their support staff. The Idea does not come with any instructions at all. Acer will not, or cannot, divulge any information. I was told by support staff that they only make the Idea according to a specification and other people sell the pc. I bought the Idea from CET UK Ltd which is supposed to be ShopAcer. They tell me to go to Acer for help and Acer tell me they are only interested if the pc is broken - no help. The PC is not broken I just do no know how to connect me set top box! It appears you cannot obtain a manual for this pc although I did get quite a thorough manual with my Tescos microwave oven!
Hence the service from the suppliers and manufacturers is total rubbish.
January 28th, 2007 08:05
In responce to the Vista question - I did an upgrade (on the Acer site you can buy priority upgrade and as I’m a VLA I already have the release version of Ultimate. It all works fine EXCEPT the media card, so no TV or anything!!! Then, it comes with no rebuild CDs, and the instructions on how to get it back to factory default simply don’t work. On top of that, XP default SP2 will not see the hard disk and Acer do not release any drivers for the boot. At present, it becomes a useless box till someone can suggest a solution!
February 6th, 2007 06:25
I’m interested in your Vista experience as I have an idea 500 and was about to purchase the oem version - we are microsoft partners! You say that Vista doesn’t recognise the media card, is that because there are no Vista drivers available?
Was it Vista Home, or Ultimate that you tried?
Also, you are recomended to create restore DVDs/CDs when you first boot the 500 - did you do this and they don’t work, or did you simply not create any recovery medium?
February 6th, 2007 09:18
Yes, hang head in shame, I didn’t create the restore DVD/CD - if anyone can burn them and send them (I’ll pay the postage) I’ll be a friend for ever!!
There were no Vista drivers available even on the manufacturer site. There are for the 510 though - wonder what the difference is. It was Vista Ultimate I used, and from the MSDN version although a few days ago I did the version from our VLA to test and see if there had been any new stuff, still nothing.
I am assuming there will be drivers shortly - a lot of manufacturers are giving April as their release date for Vista compatible drivers, but damn me and not creating the restore CDs … lesson learnt I believe (the hard way!)
February 7th, 2007 00:56
Tim,
I am happy to post a copy of the 510 restore CDs, but the graphics card and chipset drivers may be different.
I am also waiting for a copy of the Vista Upgrade to arrive, and will attempt to install this on my 510, but an email to Acer recently revealed that if I do this they will no longer warranty/support the software installed on the PC.
You mentioned drivers for the 510, I can only see a BIOS upgrade, can you let me know where you found the vista drivers?
Thanks
Ashley
February 7th, 2007 01:08
Ashley, I think that Tim wants the 500 restore CDs - I have restore DVDs that I could copy and send to him).
My understanding, when I questioned Acer support, is that the 510 has a different graphics card with much greater memory on board (256mb, I think) and that the 500 has only 32mb, but this is shared memory and they seemed to think that it could be increased. The showstopper for Vista on the 500 is the lack of a driver for the TV card. I have emailed yesterday sales@Yuan.com.tw about a driver but I don’t know whether I’ll get a reply!
Where on the Acer website can you request a Vista upgrade? I can buy the OEM version of Ultimate for about £100 + vat, but a cheaper upgrade would be better.
February 16th, 2007 04:57
Hi Roy,
To answer the question regarding the Vista upgrade, visit the link below, you will need some details of your pc plus the Windows MCE COA number.
http://upgradeweb.moduslink.com/vista/Acer/
With regards the drivers for the TV Card, there are vista specific drivers available for the Idea 510 and this uses the same tv cards as the 500. However from reading on other forums this will not resolve the live tv on vista problem. It seems to be a tuning offset issue, but as yet no one (Acer, Yuan or Microsoft) want to resolve the issue). All my emails to Acer reagarding this issue, ahve been met with standard one liners. ie only support the image shipped. Will not support drivers downloaded. etc
Thanks
Ashley
February 27th, 2007 08:47
i too own an idea 500, and have upgraded to vista ultimate. on my idea everything wirks fine including tv card. i also installed all the vista updates offered on the acer homepage
http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/desktop/aspire_idea.html
the only thing not working is the vfd display under media center. i copied the vfdtranscoder.exe from the original ehome directory in xp (c:/windows/ehome/)
but until now only the time and date is shown but not the menu structure sent by the media center. has someone got it working under vista?
February 28th, 2007 19:49
I have a slightly different problem but same issues. I bought my idea 500 in Netherlands and ended up with a Dutch langauge XP. It’s not possible to change the language so have bought a new copy of UK XP to install only to find as Tim says above XP will not see the hard drive. Acer not helping at the moment. Anyone know how to do a clean installation at the moment since I cannot upgrade and I have a machine which works but can’t understand it…..
thanks
Charlie
March 1st, 2007 11:11
you would have to load an intel matrix storage manager (intel 82801gbm sata ahci controller) during the startup of the xp installation (you have to press f6 during the startup to make xp ask you for that i think) but then xp setup trys to read the drivers from an floppy drive - which you don`t have on the idea … so i think this won`t work (maybe connect an external floppy drive?? i don`t know if the setup will find that one)
alternative: try to get an englisch recovery-cd for the idea e.g. from here http://cgi.ebay.at/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=017&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&viewitem=&item=270087674349&rd=1&rd=1
maybe this will help you?
March 2nd, 2007 02:05
peter,
thanks for this. Does the recovery disk do a complete re-install ie with XP as well? I understood some just contained the machine specific drivers etc.
Charlie
March 2nd, 2007 02:13
Right, have it all pretty much working but not had time to get it completed. Still annoyed I have to say by the fact that if you … erm … forgot … to burn the restore CDs you’re pretty much stuffed, it’s not easy to get everything you need and it took ages of searching round to find all the drivers. Can’t help much with URLs I’m afraid because it’s been so hit and miss. Good old google really.
Have to add as well that Vista is still very buggy in my opinion and anyone thinking of upgrading should wait till SP1 comes out later this year where they re-align the codebase with the server product - should increase reliability and get rid of some of the more annoying ‘features’.
March 21st, 2007 04:16
I have now posted my review of the Idea 510 over at http://www.ciao.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_iDea_510_Core_2_Duo_T5500__Review_5637622
March 27th, 2007 04:59
Good luck to any of you who ever buy an Acer product. I have spent the last 5 days going through the Acer “hoops” of trying to get my Tablet (which still has 17 months of total system guard) back to them to repair.
After speaking to 3 different condescending reps, I am done and I’m just going to trash their product and get my teacher a Toshiba or Sony.
I am a Network Administrator with 15 servers and over 800 pc’s and laptops and have dealt with all of the major companies and I will NEVER buy another Acer product. Every piece of hardware has the potential of failing and NO ONE that I spoke with could solve my simple problem of just getting the product back to them for repair??!!
April 3rd, 2007 12:57
Hi,
Guess I am not the only one who has upgraded my Idea 500 with Vista Ultimate and did not do a backup of my original system (Arrgghh!). Now I have a very unstable system, with the image on my Samsung 42″ plasma looking like poo!
I should have left the damn thing as it was. It was nearly perfect when I had XP on it.
Will Acer send any disks?
I hate Microsoft!!!!! Why can’t they release a product in the finished state instead of rushing it out to meet deadlines.
April 3rd, 2007 15:00
Yeah JoeKay, I have to agree. I’d got a bit blaze upgrading thanks to Apple. Each time I upgrade my Apple to the latest O/S they release I get no problems. I ran the Vista upgrade asistant on the Acer and it picked up no problems (I always kill Symantec, there are free virus checkers which score higher in independent tests) and then went to the install. Microsoft were already far behind their deadline so had to get it out and not miss another, and of course a huge amount of blame has to go to the hardware suppliers. Vista was in development for such a long time you wonder why so many companies still have no Vista driver support, it simply does not make sense especially as you know Microsoft will eventually force you down the upgrade path.
I have to say that I now find the whole media centre concept flawed. The PC simply does not fit the TV mold well. It takes too long to boot, or to come out of standby, it’s to noisy, all these things.
Oh, and no, Acer will not send you the disks! I find it strange when the cost is so small that they do not have a serial number linked download site for people like us who forgot to do the rebuild disks. Having said that, for £800 odd you’d think a DVD would come with it! You think Acer ever bother to read any of their user reviews? Doubt it.
April 23rd, 2007 12:16
Has anyone got the HDMI to output @720p on the 500 to work without overscan? I always get overscan on evey panel I have used it on, yet Acer say that it is the panels problem on the graphics card! please help.
May 21st, 2007 14:04
Acer Aspire Idea 510
DONT upgrade to Vista!!!!
I was excited about upgrading my 510 to Vista. The experience was bad to say the least.
I made back ups as per instructions. Which I followed exactly.
Once the upgrade had completed, the main function of my 510 did not work, the media part. You could watch a video with no sound, then have to close MC down and start again before watching tv.
I decided to restore back to XP. This failed. The restore got stuck in a loop, wanting to restore each time I rebooted.
I spoke to five different people at Acer’s technical support team in the UK. Each one gave me a different answer/excuse.
1. They dont support Vista at all, I would have to speak to Microsoft.
2. The upgrade disks I received have nothing to do with Acer (even though they are branded with Acer on them)
3. Once you upgrade to vista you loose you license rights to XP (this was a funny one, as for a fee of £50 they will restore your pc back to factory settings)
Each person I spoke to on the Acer technical support line was very rude. How ever nice I tried to be to them, I was belittled.
I wrote to their head of sales at their Bath Road offices, Heathrow. No reply received to my letter.
If anyone is thinking of buy an Acer product think very carefully. My personal experience of them is grab your money and run and dont look back…..
June 18th, 2007 06:47
I have a 500, I did a fresh install of Vista Home Premium, installed all the updates off the Acer website (then went and googled for a decent driver for the Tuner card), installed a Vista codec pack and everything was working fine. Although I never noticed if the VFD worked properly or not…
But I decided I wanted to go back to MCE (but a clean install as “visualizations” [sic] have never worked) so I used nLite to copy the Intel Raid/Sata drivers onto a OEM copy of XP MCE - no need for a floppy drive now (and no need to press F6)
Now I have no info whatseover on the VFD except “Welcome to Aspire Idea” or “System is Sleeping”…
Fortunately I DID burn the original system recovery discs so I may have to resort back to loading them and live without “visualizations”
September 5th, 2007 15:08
I’m living a nightmare with my Aspire idea 500! I tryed to order the upgrade from moduslink, but they canceled the orders during my holidays, so i didn’t arrive in time to renew the order… those moduslink guys are bullshiters! I bough windows vista Home premium, and downloaded the drivers to vista from acer. Besides of the image playback quality (that freezes and skips all the time), I can’t get the sound from the hdmi connection, as i did with xp. I tryed to get back to xp with recovery discs, but I get an error message. The Alt+F10 recover simply doesn’t work, and Acer simply doesn’t support me! The don’t even answer my emails! Can anyone help me? I can give to anyone who wants the recovery DVDs. Does anyone have the original vista upgrade specific to this model?
Thank you
September 16th, 2007 11:41
Oh my god, this feels good in a strange way.I’m not alone.
what do these f***ckwits at ACER think they are doing pissing of all their customers. Got stuck exactly the same way. Upgraded to Vista, no hard disk, black screen on TV signal. I think I must have called ACER Support probably about 25 times, to absolutely no avail. They have no clue about what they do and the only thing they can say is that they support the standard build. I even gto it so far that they allowed me to send in the Acer, and charged my 50 GPB. I got the PC back in the same state, no changes. Never got my 50 pounds back though. I will NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER buy an ACER in my life again..
September 16th, 2007 11:42
Oh my god, this feels good in a strange way.I’m not alone.
what do these f***ckwits at ACER think they are doing pissing of all their customers. Got stuck exactly the same way. Upgraded to Vista, no hard disk, black screen on TV signal. I think I must have called ACER Support probably about 25 times, to absolutely no avail. They have no clue about what they do and the only thing they can say is that they support the standard build. I even gto it so far that they allowed me to send in the Acer, and charged my 50 GPB. I got the PC back in the same state, no changes. Never got my 50 pounds back though. I will NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER buy an ACER in my life again..
April 9th, 2008 00:11
SATA prevents downgrade to XP from Vista.
Tried the Vista upgrade and many things (inc tv tuners) never worked properly in MediaCenter, despite much effort with different codecs/drivers/etc.
Forced to do a downgrade to XP, using a slipstreamed XP image with intel SATA drivers (using nLite). XP finished installing, but on first reboot the system halted with “disk read error occured, press ctrl-alt-delete to reboot”. Bios does not support SATA IDE emulation so I am fast running out of options. I doubt Acer will re-install mine as i have broken the warranty case stickers to upgrade the hard disk.
Has anyone got suggestions for how to proceed please?
April 19th, 2008 09:44
Hi everybody,
I’m trying to downgrade my Idea 510 form Vista to XP … but, acer support people ignore me. Does anybody have the SATA drivers for XP?
June 10th, 2008 11:21
Bought a 510 with XP MC and upgraded it to Vista (via the official Acer way); many bugs/ hours and hours trying to solve it. Acer support via website is lame! Support via (Dutch) supporttelephone: after 3 times no result. Nearly downgraded the machine back to XP but bought a second and new 510 with Vista pre-installed (incuding tools/ utils/ drivers); made a copy of the disks a i now have 2 510’s with Vista: it’s ok now. But had to upgrade the memory because the standard 1Gb ram is not enough. Conclusion? Hardware is nice; support is AWFULL! Just buy Acer ready working and do not try to upgrade it.
June 18th, 2008 05:52
@ Jeff Martin
Since your not giving any actual details of the circumstances regarding your problems, i highly doubt this is caused solely by Acer.
I myself am a happy Acer customer, and a lot of friends and family seem to be happy customers too. Even the ones that had actual repairs done.
I cant imagine that your problems effect all customers of this company.
@ Tinus
You already told the cause of your problem:
,,Upgraded to Vista”
a) Everybody that even takes 5 minutes of reading up on user experiences with Vista, knows you should stay miles away from it, or at least, if u have XP installed, not to upgrade to Vista. If you bought a system with Vista pre-installed-> downgrade, if possible, or accept the fact that you bought a pre-mature OS, wich has problems. Most of these problems can be fixed, if you have the nerve and time, and a little knowledge (or someone that can help you).
Of course there are problems (i am facing these aswell), that cannot be solved at this time. XP had these problems aswell, before SP2 came out. Just accept the fact that MS is inferior to Apple, or buy and Apple.
I absolutely do not condone unfair treatment by callcenter agents, but you have to realise that windows support has been, and always will be bad.
As far as i have read in the Warranty Terms of Acer, you do not even have a legal right to software support.
September 6th, 2008 07:43
This is a bit off topic, but for some reason the VFD on the front has stopped showing anything and I get a “OpenVFD” Error: 6 in Windows for which there is no support out there. Any clues?
September 25th, 2008 05:56
I get the same problem as Tim since 24 of september
October 20th, 2008 05:08
I had the same problems as many of you, I came accross a website which will answer most of your questions and its completely FREE!
The problem seems to be that ACER UK don’t seem to know about ACER US which has most of the service answers in English along with a FREE downloadable Manual for the Acer Aspire 500 & 510 DTS or T5500 (PDF Format).
See: http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/portal20.cfm?website=AcerPanAm.com&siteid=7117&areaid=2&formid=3390#results
This link should take you to the exact page or just search www.acerpanam.com for the correct model.
PS overall a very good system but has some driver issues with vista, you can download the latest drivers from both the US an UK sites.
Good luck
Tim.