Businesses have come to rely on Acer workstations for their stability and usability without a huge price tag, and this system easily fulfills these requirements.
Given the specs this machine packs, the Veriton performed well during our tests, with its 2.6GHz Pentium 4 cooled by a whisper quiet 3,800rpm heatsink fan. The 845G motherboard was a concern: it features a single stick of 256MB PC2100 DDR-RAM, with only one further slot for expansion. The board does cap at 2GB of memory.
A sturdy steel midi tower houses the system and the form factor is compact; much less obtrusive than the other business machines reviewed this month. It features six USB ports along with audio connectivity, with both input types available at the front and rear of the system for easy access. The overall build quality is impressive, and the chassis has an in-built intrusion detection switch, paired with a set of loops for padlocks.
A puzzling but welcome inclusion is a CD-RW/DVD combo drive - a strange peripheral in the office, but at this price, we wouldn't say no to having a burner in every machine on our network. Also raising eyebrows was the included 64MB GeForce4 MX440SE - it's a little overkill for Word and Excel, however, it's perfect for the odd gaming session.
Considering critical data generally isn't stored locally, the 60GB 7,200rpm EIDE hard disk drive is more than adequate.
Acer offers an on-site, one-year parts and labour warranty, along with another two years RTB, much like the IBM above. Also included are: Windows XP Professional; and a multimedia keyboard, mouse and speakers - but a CRT, not a TFT.
Competitively priced, it's the ideal convergence unit – good for the home or the office.