There were some minor issues, however, that sort of irked me.
1) Wireless mouse and keyboard do not work out of the box. I had to plug in a USB mouse and keyboard, as I couldn’t get these to sync up.That is sort of a problem, because Windows 8 requires you to answer a few questions.I can easily see someone not being able to get passed the initial setup because the wireless keyboard and mouse didn’t work with it. Its ok to me, because I didn’t want to use the supplied keyboard and mouse anyway.

2) I could not boot to CD or USB drive with the default settings.Secureboot needs to be turned off in the BIOS, and launch CSM needs to be set to always in order for this to work.The Launch CSM setting is actually deceptive, as it takes on a grey color that usually indicates you aren’t able to change it in the BIOS.It took me a while to notice it was there.

3) Gigabit ethernet driver needed to be updated – This one was sort of a big one for me.This machine shipped with a barely working driver for the built in gigabit ethernet.Using a LAN cable, it crawled and the connection often stalled.I had to connect using the built in wireless and use device manager to search online for a more recent driver.You could also download the updated driver from Intel’s website, although it seemed to me that the driver that device manager found made the network traffic a little more snappy than the one from Intel’s site..

4) The UEFI bios and the requirement to use Launch CSM made the linux install I did very difficult.The fact that I needed to use compatibility mode to boot to CD meant that I could not install Linux on the disk while using GPT. Since compatibility mode (Launch CSM – always) was on, Linux thought the machine was only capable of booting using an MBR, and would not install on a free partition.I had to wipe the machine and make the disk boot via MBR instead of GPT.This was sort of s***ty, since I really wanted to keep Windows on there as well.

I also ended up loading a special firmware for Linux on there.I’m not sure why I had to do this, but everyone seemed to recommend this.

So, in effect, the hardware is quite good in this machine.I really hate the BIOS in this machine.I can’t stress that enough.Never had this problem with an Asus UEFI bios. The driver for the NIC and the failure of the KB and Mouse to work out of the box was annoying, but it was easy enough to work around these problems.

I had concerns with streaming video to a nettop but this unit handles streaming seamlessly. The product itself is excellent, great build quality comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Plugged in a webcam and can now skype from the living room. Plays DVD’s and with a region free player it can play my UK as well as US DVD’s.

The only reason this unit did not get 5 stars is purely down to Windows 8 and Microsoft not ironing out all the bugs in a new operating system. I have no doubts that the early bugs will be patched quickly but some applications do not work at present unit they are updated. I had to use the accessibility mode in the operating system as the fonts are quite small when viewed on a 60" TV from 15′ away.

5 Stars when Microsoft sort out Windows 8.

I did have one small issue though. I wanted to do a clean install of Windows 8 PRO and it was not able to boot up from the Windows 8 DVD or even Windows 7 DVD. I did set in BIOS CD/DVD media as a primary boot option and it still wouldn’t boot up from either DVD which did work on another PC. I even tried an external USB DVD player/recorder which also would not work.
If anyone knows a solution to this issue, let me know.

Windows 8.I hate it.Secure boot, EFI lockdown, crash galore.I desperately created a recovery disk (which requires more than 16GB for the acer image) and windows update.Desperate, because windows 8 would randomly crashes and reboots.I tried to move off windows 8 completely but moving to a different system, like ubuntu 12.10, made it difficult with secure boot and new gen EFI.The switch over in modeset is making it difficult.

I feel locked on windows 8 for now till either windows 8 improves or intel makes framebuffer drivers more mature on open platforms.

Normally, Acer has been really good at creating products that are upgradeable.This device fell far short of my expectations.

1) It only comes with 4 GB of RAM (with integrated graphics, you’re actually getting less).It’s supports up to 8 GB of RAM.When I tried opening the box to add more memory, one of the 4 screws holding the top on broke and now it can’t be removed at all.Acer’s support has gone so far down hill that they can’t seem to help.They don’t offer replacements or advice other than "take it to one of our repair centers that are 1000+ miles away from you"

2) I wanted to see how well Ubuntu or Fedora ran on it.It would not let me boot from the DVD drive.I had to create a USB boot drive and it would only boot from it half the time.When it finally did boot.It kept beeping and the screen flashed every color in the visible spectrum.

If you have a problem with this product, good luck getting help from Acer.I’ve never had problems with them before, but the support they offered me on the 3 occasions that I contacted them was pathetic.