I've now had my Revo for 1 month and there are lots of things I like about it and several things I don't like.
Revo is small, quite, low powered and simple. No fan noises nor excessive heat at all. I notice the "thumping" of my external hard drive during seeks more than anything coming out of the Revo.
The ION Graphics and HD 5.1/7.1 sound over HDMI work great (when they work). When running video of any kind, you absolutely need to latest codec's which supports ION. For Flash video, only 10.1 pre-release works. WMP 11; Unbox as well. You can tell it is working by 2 things: no hope of HD video output without it; CPU constantly peaks at 100% without it as seen on the Task Manager on the performance tab. Playing MKV/MP4 on H.264 is generally smooth with some streaming play "pausing" (testing on Amazon On Demand in HD ). Streaming supports up to your 100T speeds through a wired network cable. Anything Hulu runs fine.
I added an external Bluray player which works with my PowerDVD 8 Deluxe [OLD VERSION]8 . Flawless and as good as any Bluray with DTS True HD. Getting 5.1/7.1 sound needs an upgrade though.
Advice: Don't try to upgrade ANY nVidia drivers without planning for a long outage as you most likely will lose your HD Sound. Just google "acer revo no hdmi sound" and you will see others struggling with this. I made the mistake of updated my ION video driver directly from nVidia and lost my sound until I did a "Restore to Factory Settings" operation packaged on a hidden partition on my Revo in order to get HD sound back. The nVidia HD sound device is not selected by default, so you always need to go into the Control Panel -> Sound ... and select it. What happens after I updated my video driver is that no matter what sound drivers I installed (even driver roll back), the nVidia HD device never shows up anymore. A friend told me that I would have needed to uninstall every nVidea driver; do a driver cleanup; then reinstall all of the latest drivers in order to get that to work again. Frankly, I haven't tried this yet as it already sounds really painful.
Haven't tried Linux yet, but tempted to see if that flips me over to loving this device. Otherwise, I can't complain about the price. It brings a PC onto my home theater which is nice for doing email etc. I often debate if I should have gone the other way - bluray plus streaming video support. But then you get locked in to what your bluray will (or will not) support.
Acer AspireRevo AR1600-U910H Black/White Desktop PC (Windows XP Home)
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