If you look around online the last couple weeks, you won’t be able to find any of these little machines offered on reputable USA online dealers. The only Aspire Revo offered on Newegg is the lower priced model AR1600 with single-core Atom, 1GB RAM, running XP. On Newegg, the AR3610 have not been available since mid-December 2009.

There are speculations on what is going on at Acer, from switching SKU numbers, newer parts, or different box contents. Most people, myself included, have found no use with the included USB speakers, and many have wished that Acer instead should have included a VESA monitor backmount kit.

[Updated 2/11/2010] I got an email today from Newegg that they have this unit back again and on sale for $325 + Free Shipping! And it’s true, the new units now contain the mount kit instead of the USB speakers, so go and buy them now!

So I guess I’m lucky to have not procastinated but jumped right on to grab 3 units since after Windows 7 came out. I have been planning for a while to get a new HTPC box, and have been fascinated with the new Windows 7 as well as the Intel Atom and NVidia ION platform. To me these 3 form the perfect potion for a Home Theater PC. Without building one myself, the choices are few for pre-built systems:

1. ASRock
2. Asus eeeBox
3. Dell Zino
4. Acer Aspire Revo

Eventually I went with Acer, and boy did I make a big jump, 3 units after all is said and done! Though ASRock came out first, they didn’t have Windows 7 installed. The Acer were available with Windows 7 64-bit so soon after the launch of Window 7 was to me the killing move by them, especially for the Holiday sale period. The beautiful form factor, decent configuration and price made it a winner, for me and my purpose at least. Asus eeeBox was never available for sale in the US, and Dell Zino is lame for using desktop CPU in a miniMac look-alike. If Dell had made the Zino like a year ago then they would have made sense to me. The Zino now only works if you have in mind a sexy Mac-wanna-be desktop. Dell what took you so long?

The first one I bought was early November. I bought them sequentially, meaning I only put in the next order after the previous one shipped or arrived, the reason simply was I didn’t plan to buy that many! Right after the first unit arrive, the 2nd one went on waiting list. The wait on the 2nd unit was 3 weeks, and when that one shipped, I immediately put in a 3rd order, which went on waiting list for another 2 weeks. Why did I buy so many? One for myself, the other 2 are for my sister and brother. 

The package

As is the trend these days, there is no printed manual, just one sheet Quick Start guide. With the general public getting more computer savvy, and in an effort to cut cost (and claiming to go green at the same time, why not?), everything now moves digital. The System Guide is installed on the hard drive if you want to read. The factory default configuration (disk image) and application installers are all stored in a hidden partition. To extract these into DVDs, Acer provides the eRecovery Management software which are convenient to use, however you need to have a separate external DVD burner for this. See how they cut cost by eliminating the DVD burner and shift the cost of physical DVD media tothe end users? I don’t mind.

The following are what I learned from using these systems as a home theater hub. Your experience might differ if you use them as your main desktop (that is, installing and running a lot of applications on it), or gaming.

What impressed me

After using these for more than a month now, what impress me about these little machines are

1. They are 64-bit machines, with Windows 7 Home Premium preinstalled. I haven’t had any problem with 64-bit drivers.  I have a couple Chinese MKV movies with English subtitles and they have been playing fine on 32-bit machines, using ffdshow for audio, Haali Splitter for video, and DirectVobSub for subtitle. To get them to play on the 64-bit Acer, some effort and trials were required. Eventually you would need 64-bit ffdshow (I use rev3164), 64-bit Haali Splitter, and the 64-bit K-Lite codec pack installer. I never like installing the mega codecs pack in the past, so in this case I used the K-Lite installer just to get the DirectVobSub component, since there is no stand-alone 64-bit version of DirectVobSub. Now with these components installed, the MKV beam beautifully from the AR3610 to my home theater, with subtitle.
2. Full NVidia ION chipset, not the LE version on the AR1600 model
3. 2GB RAM, 1 GB more than the AR1600 model. This machine handles TV recording without a hitch. 
4. HDMI with audio. It works just out of the box, so if you have just this machine and a flat-screen TV with HDMI input, you can enjoy video and sound in no time.
5. Digital audio output. This machine has an optical output port which Acer taped up with white tape, obviously to hide the little black hole from uglifying the beauty of a machine. It seems these ports must have been manufactured only in black, ask yourself if you have ever seen a white optical audio output port. I still use a separate audio out in my home theater system, so this port is a must and I’m glad this beauty has it. Acer is also thoughtful enough to include an optical audio port cover plug, in case you peeled off the tape and later on for whatever reason want to cover up that port. Again this included port plug is black.
6. The wireless RF mouse and keyboard. Did I say RF? Yep, so you don’t need a line of sight to operate these, extremely useful in a home theater setup where your AR3610 can stay behind the TV, or hidden in a cabinet somewhere. This is much better than the wired ones included with the AR1600 model, though they might have changed to wireless on the later units. The keyboard is compact, quite useful to a guy lounging on a sofa. The mouse has an on/off switch to conserve battery when you don’t use it.
7. Absolutely quiet. You wouldn’t know you have a computer running with your home theater, except for that glaring white light shining through the power button. If you’re annoyed by it, do as I do, tape it up with some stickies. I used several round sticky red markers for this.
8. Wireless N. Yeah! I barely have jitters watching movies through wireless, but due to the limitations in my home network, I eventually went wired on it, however it will perform decently on wireless too, for watching movies I mean. I don’t have HD movies so I don’t know if it can handle the stream good or not.
9. I kept the pre-installed Windows 7 on all systems, and not converting these boxes to XBMC or Linux. The primary use for these is with Windows Media Center which I set it to launch after booting into Windows. I now have access to all the music, pictures and videos at the home theater system in the big room. Occasionally I also use it for Internet browsing to Hulu or Youtube, and they handle the jobs quite nice.
10. eSATA port. Imagine you can hook up a SATA hard drive to it if you need to, which will allow better speed than USB.

What additional hardware I added

So you might want to know what to expect if you’re thinking of getting a similar one to go with your home theater

1.  USB IR receiver. Not one of those IrDA receiver mind you, but a remote control receiver. I couldn’t find anyone who sells just the remote control receiver, so I bought a cheap Vista MCE remote which always come with a USB receiver, throw away the remote, and just plug the sexy little receiver into the box to use with my universal Harmony remote control or URC MX-3000 remote.
2. TV tuner. I recommend at a minimum the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950Q which is a nice external USB stick, it comes with a remote (I have no use for it), and it supports both ATSC (for over-the-air HDTV) , QAM (for cable HDTV users), and just simple analog signal (either over-the-air or via cable TV), so you are set for the future no matter which way you decide to go with. I heard there will be dual tuners packaged into just 1 USB stick, so get that if you can, so that you can view 1 channel and record another at the same time.
3. External DVD drive. I haven’t, but you need it to backup your system. These are cheap these days, from $50 to under $100. If you get one, get a burner, not just a DVD ROM. I recommend Lite-On.
4. External hard drive. The internal one was divided into 2 partition, a 7GB hidden one that stores the factory image, and the main partition has 131GB (formatted),  with 107GB free after the OS and after I removed all the junk, just enough for light TV recording use. If you record TV extensively, an external eSATA hard drive is not a bad idea.
5. Connection cables. You need an HDMI cable to connect to your TV or receiver, and if you’re like me, still using a separate digital audio path, then buy an optical audio cable too.

Software I did not remove

All the bloatware and software trials were uninstalled, but be careful NOT to remove any of these:

1. Acer Hotkey Utility which drives the wireless keyboard,
2. Acer Identity Card which shows all details about your system such as serial number etc,
3. Acer eRecovery Management, used to create factory default disk image as well as default application installers. See below on this process
4. I also left alone the Acer Updater and Backup Manager, just to be on the safe side.
5. I replaced the McAfee antivirus with the free Avast or MSFT Security Essentials

Backup your default configuration

As good practice, you should create a set of DVDs that are the factory default configuration, using the included eRecovery Management software. It’s very straightforward, all you need is an external DVD burner and 3 blank DVDs. Acer keeps this disc image as well as the original application installers on a hidden partition of about 17 GB. Burning each disc takes about 6 minutes, but there is a 3 minutes data reading before the burn, then 6 minutes disc verification.

You have the choice to password-protect these discs, I would say don’t do it. There is no personal data, and as always is the case, when you need to run the disc is when you no longer remember the darn password.

Optionally, you might also want to create an Application/Driver disc as well. For this you need only 1 DVD, and on my system, the verification step took a long time, a whopping 30+ minutes!

Then if you ever want to restore, you have 3 options: restore the whole disc image, restore just the OS (retaining your personal data), or just reinstall the applications and drivers.

Ongoing Backup

It’s also a good idea to occasionally back up your data. Acer provides the Backup Manager, which allows you to back up certain files/folders, or create a snapshot of what is currently on your disc (disc image). This is more user-friendly than the Windows Backup and Restore utility, however I prefer to use Windows utility, as it allows me to back up the hidden partition as well (Acer Reserved disc). Note that Windows Backup only let you back up a disc image when the backup destination is a hard drive, not DVD drive.

Quirks

There is not a piece of documentation in the box. They have gone completely digital. The User Guide is a PDF in the computer. I don’t mind about that. Then of the 3 systems that I bought and set up, these are the quirks that I ran into:

1. On one system, uninstalling McAfee messed up the security settings in Internet Explorer 8, so that I can’t get any downloads through it and can’t watch Youtube videos. [Update 1/22/2010] Because the AppDrv1 DVD created from the eRecovery Management app doesn’t have the McAfee app , I had to perform a full system restore and repeated the uninstall, this time it worked.
2. On another system, the first time I tried to launch a WMV audio stream from an internet site, the system came back with an error that it didn’t recognize the extension. But on the 2nd try 30 seconds later, it worked. I’ve seen this problem with an HP netbook my brother got new for Christmas, so it’s something with the initialization of the Windows Media Player engine when you use it the first time.

Summary

My wait for the ultimate home theater PC has been long, 3 years. During that time I had to put up with Vista, running on computers scrapped together with old parts, working out the kinks and figured out what I want for my HTPC. But the wait was worth it. Acer has done everything right on this system, and executed it with perfect timing. If I have to complaint, then it is those useless USB speakers, and the positioning of the optical port at the front which makes for a clumsy and ugly connection. Everything else is well thought out. This is my first system with Acer and I’m quite surprised by what they pulled off with this AR3610. A 64-bit system with all the hardware that I want, i.e. Atom dual-core 330, NVidia ION, 2GB RAM, and came with pre-installed Windows 7 Home Premium. Capable of playing 2 roles: a Media Center for your pictures, videos and movies, a desktop machine for your internet surfing, Hulu and Youtube watching, my needs are met for several years to come. Now if only they come out with new compact multi-tuners for sattelite/cable watching/recording …

Our brother’s Christmas gift to us was an LCD monitor. He couldn’t stand seeing us still using CRT monitor, albeit a damn fine one, a 21-inch Sony Trinitron 500, .24 dot pitch. So, after I looked around, I decided on a Dell 24-inch S2409w which has been on the market since Sept 2008, on sale at Best Buy at $250 before tax, and 3-year Dell warranty. We couldn’t be happier with it. Text is as sharp as on the CRT, which is critical to me because I love the tact-sharp text on the CRT. The photos looks darn good on it too, the LCD is capable of 85% gamut. I hooked it upo to 2 computers, one with DVI connection running Windows 7, and the other through VGA is an old XP machine.