An affordable starting point for DIY upgrades

Cons: The hard drive this comes with is slow, even slower than my previous 8-year old Windows 7 machine with a regular old hard drive. The Windows 10 install comes with a lot of bloatware from Acer, antivirus, etc. and you have to uninstall all of that or wipe and reinstall Windows afresh. It also does not come with Office, so I made the switch to OpenOffice. My main gripe with this purchase was that the audio jack on the front had a lot of noise, and it's built into the motherboard so it's not easily replaceable. I bought a dongle that promised to help reduce the noise and it did, but I still had noise. I could get the noise to stop by wiggling the audio jack connector in the socket, so I decided to see if dismantling the case and installing the SSD might help. Sure enough, after doing that the noise is completely gone. If it hadn't been for that I would have sent it back. Pros: The box is really cheap ($340 at time of purchase) and the specs are pretty good so I can forgive the hard drive. It's easy enough to swap in an SSD with Macrium Reflect and with a little extra RAM you can make a really great machine for an extra $100 or so.Read full review

Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New