Acer Aspire TC-1780-UA92 Desktop | 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13400 Processor | 8GB 3200MHz DDR4 | 512GB M.2 SSD | SD Card Reader | Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 | Windows 11 Home, Black

Warning: Uses an anti-consumer proprietary connectors. This PC is made to be non-repairable and non-upgradable. You cannot add any modern graphics card to this computer. Unless you’re only intending to give this computer to your grandparents to check their email, this computer is going to be in a landfill in a few years. It cannot be serviced nor upgraded by normal means.

There are many anti-consumer tricks here, and I’m so sad that reviewers aren’t pointing them out. For instance, the motherboard of this computer is made to a nonstandard size so it won’t fit in most cases. This includes that the front panel I/O is built onto the motherboard. If you don’t know what that means, imagine that you want to move into a new house. But you find out the company that makes the kitchen appliances like the fridge has connected big brackets from the fridge all the way to your front and back doors. So nobody can ever fix the fridge if there’s a problem. But they also can’t ever fix the doors either. One company controls the whole thing, end to end, and they get to dictate terms to you.

I could go on. Bad deals:

Acer proprietary motherboard connector means you cannot connect any normal power supply to this computer. If you ever have a problem, you’re locked into Acer’s service department for life. For tech people, it’s a nonstandard 6-pin connector, specifically made so you cannot swap in any normal power supply, even one from Dell or HP, even if the power supply itself is the exact same part. Even if you connect a normal power supply, the fans would spin forever and the power supply will draw energy until you unplug it.

300W power supply is woefully underpowered. You cannot upgrade this computer with normal parts like a graphics card. The computer is going to be a paperweight in a few years, because it cannot be upgraded.

Non-standard parts. The motherboard is intentionally constructed so you can’t move it to a new computer if there is a problem. If your case gets banged up, or you have some other problem with your hardware, Acer is going to try to force you to use their service plans, and probably force you to buy a new computer since they’re going to stop making all these parts as soon as they develop a new model.

Lack of power, lack of connectors, and lack of space all mean it’s basically impossible to connect any modern graphics card to this computer. Without a graphics card, you’re going to struggle just playing basic games like Fortnite. The computer basically has one hand tied behind its back, so even though the included parts are strong, they’ll never work like they should for any graphics-intensive process (gaming, 3d modeling, and so on).

Overall:

This computer is basically built for elderly people, schools, and other settings where the most the computer is going to be asked to do in its lifetime is browse the internet or write some documents. You are supposed to throw it away the moment it has problems, and buy a whole new one. For a lot of computer users like me, that’s not okay. I want to be able to fix my computer if something goes wrong, and I need to be able to upgrade my computer with basic parts like a graphics card. This computer is incapable of that. I cannot recommend it whatsoever. The only people who should buy this are people looking to buy 300 cheap workstations for a school, and they probably want the lack of upgrade options so people won’t try to steal them and resell them.

Computer works well and a good value. No instructions or advise enclosed in the box.

La PC es un poco mas grande de lo que imagine, pero esta excelente, solo necesito ponerle otros 8GB de RAM. Su fuerte en si es tener un procesador de los mas nuevos, que yo creo es lo mas importante.

Not so good if you are my grandchildren who demand high res gaming. But for tax software, printing, word processing, and internet it is fine. Also fine if you use PC as I do for interfacing to electronic test gear. Pulled cover in under 20 seconds, easy to access internals, all connectors and dram were secure, extra cabling and drive isolators for one more drive present. Case perfectly adequate. You want lights and sound go to a carnival. Saw some complaints about esthetics of desktop case. Really? I just stuck it under my desk where like the one replaced I expect it will look shaggy with dust in short order. Have never been one to stare at my computers case. Compared to 1st gen IBM pc included keboard is skinny and lightweight, so is mouse but, they work fine as well. Drive is silent, fan barely audible. Major con is Win11 and it’s bloatware but you get that with every PC. Note: turn off “one drive” msoft populated my new pc screen with nonsense I never wanted to see again unless I went to cloud and fetched it. Only gripe about Actual PC was that the card slot was filled with rubber, no circuitry. If you use SD or other cards for maps, music, pictures etc you will need a usb to whatever adapter. So, office – yes, maybe too good. Home – perfect. Under 8 gamers, will be happy. After that sorry folks fork over another $1k. FWIW I am running this with an old analog VGA on a $8 hdmi adapter. It is fine. Wireless on speedtest ( have mesh network) ran at 300 mbps. Was able to download Turbo Tax and watch Netflix simultaneously no buffering. Minus one star for excluding card reader. CAUTION: 1) ACER provides NO info regarding how to install anything on this computer. You can go to the citizens help site or whatever nonsense they have named it and beg one of the moderators to look something up in the tech support manual but YOU, Ordinary customer keeping company solvent cannot have access to same. Ditto for specs.( FWIW, PCIe1 is a gen 3 and the 16 is a gen 4). You can slap 2 SSD or HD onto the plate inside, add a 1650 Graphics card – but will block your PCIe1, or forget graphics and use PCIe1 for a port expander. Issue 2: This box will perform ” out of box experience” and register itself thru microsoft to acer with whatever email you gave microsoft. Changing it as I wanted to do as I have an acer account for 2 laptops is difficult a) talk or chat with acer get on list for ” protection agent ” who will send you email asking to confirm change of email. b) wait for more mail and id number from protection person or get back on with plain old acer agent and get double secret website url via email where you can register “warranty” after sending proof of purchase. This still does not get you a registration but is warranty only. No I do not know what great gifts full reg gets you but I will bet it is access to updates or some such. It was so frustrating and time consuming I thought of returning the darn thing and getting the competitor.

Easy to expand. They even provide an angled cover plate to attach to an add-on dvd drive and an extra power node for an addon storage device. I added both. Not much preinstalled crap software except the obligatory McAfee virus which is easy to uninstall. Perfect for email and watching YouTube fail videos.