Acer Veriton N282G review

This truly miniature PC, measuring just 192 x 192mm and only 36mm thick, sits on an equally compact v-shaped stand, making it suitable for even the smallest desk. The silver and black casing looks reasonably stylish but – more importantly – it’s reasonably tough.

The Veriton ships with a full-size keyboard and mouse, but alas, the build quality on these is less impressive – the keyboard looks and feels plasticky, and the mouse feels flimsy. This is a pity, because the keyboard has a handy volume control dial on its right hand corner, and there’s also a mounting kit for attaching the Veriton N282G to a desk, which will make it less vulnerable to theft if you don’t need to move computers from classroom to classroom.

The Veriton N282G may be a small form factor PC, but it gives any full-size PC a run for its money when it comes to connectivity. At the front are four USB 2 ports, a multi-card reader and headphone and microphone jacks. Around the back are serial, HDMI, Ethernet and VGA ports, plus a Kensington lock slot for keeping the PC secure.

There’s also an additional USB 2 port on the top, close to the power button. Our review model came with Windows 7 Professional, plus a little bloatware in the form of a range of Acer utilities and trial versions of Norton and McAfee software.

The first thing we noticed when the Veriton N282G was up-and-running was how quiet it was – even a bat would struggle to detect a sound from this ultra-quiet PC. On paper, the Veriton N282G’s specs are nothing to write home about – a 1.8GHZ Atom processor, 2GB RAM and 160GB hard disk. A 0.19 score in our PC Pro benchmarks is low, but what we’d expect.

All the same, the Nvidia ION graphics processor ensures that HD video will play smoothly, and general web browsing and office applications run perfectly well. You wouldn’t want to edit video on this computer, or run too many applications simultaneously, but for most classroom IT activities, the Veriton N282G is fine.

The lack of an optical drive is a concern, though a minor one unless you rely heavily on DVD or CD-based content for teaching. Otherwise, the Veriton N282G delivers a decent performance for its size and price, although you might want to budget extra for a replacement keyboard and mouse.