Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
My brother and I bought one of these for our dad, who is in his late 80s and uses a computer mainly for email - to connect with his 11 children, 39 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. He takes lots of photos, receives lots of photos by email, and occasionally has to prepare a document or two, such as writing a letter or filling out a form. This computer takes up so much less space than his old desktop, and has so many fewer loose cords, that he is ecstatic with how much less flustered it makes him. He thinks the wireless keyboard is particularly cool.And, I liked it enough while I was setting it up for him, that I decided to order one for myself, for my next desktop. I have been using an old laptop since my old desktop died, and the laptop really isn't quite sufficiently versatile for the things I do - writing music using special software, preparing newsletters for organizations I'm in - I need something with a full keyboard including 10-key pad, not just a laptop keyboard. The keyboard that comes with this computer is, as I said, wireless, and it's quite smooth - enough tactile feedback for accuracy, but not as clicky-clacky as older keyboards. The mouse is also wireless, although these days a lot of us take that for granted.There are a couple of disadvantages to this and the others in the TouchSmart family - for example, the CD/DVD player is on the side of the vertical screen/cpu piece, and there are occasionally CDs that get the hiccups in a vertical setting rather than the traditional horizontal. For that, well, one can always buy a USB CD drive separately - they're pretty cheap now - if you turn out to have a LOT of CDs that balk at being vertical. The other disadvantage is that the spot on the left side where one plugs in ethernet cables and printer cables is pretty well hidden, and a little difficult to figure out how to open - The average 80-something year old grandpa probably will need someone younger to attend to these details in initial setup. There are a couple of USB ports easily and obviously available, but the majority of the USB ports are also hidden with the ethernet cable port. Some of you may wind up just leaving the cover off that, to make it easier access.The touch-screen technology is not quite as fast as the more conventional parts of the unit; if you're a gamer and you were thinking that this might be a good gaming computer because of the screen size and thought that maybe the touch-screen would be a handy addition, be aware that it's not up to gaming speed. The rest of the computer is fast, though - quite up-to-date processing speed. Lots and lots of memory, too - it's /possible/ to store enough music to outrun it, but it ain't easy. If you're that kind of person, you probably have an external storage drive just for music, anyway (my late husband named our terabyte drive Gort, after the movie robot.) Anyway, the touch-screen speed IS adequate for selecting icons, skimming through photo albums, and scrolling through your email. The space-saving part is really the best part. I can't tell you how nice it is not to have a &^%* tower, and the total square inches of footprint are no more than my laptop, albeit distributed differently with the wide screen. Again, the wireless keyboard is a huge help in reducing footprint.