Rumours circulated that an Amstrad PC would overheat, and while existing owners would note that this did not happen, new buyers were discouraged.

[9] Another example of rumour was the suggestion that there were issues with the 'unshielded' power supply in the monitor affecting an optional hard drive that could be installed at the back of the base unit and further that this would be solved by taping tin foil or aluminum foil over the back of the base unit or the bottom of the monitor to shield the hard drive.

[10] In 1987 the PC1512 was followed by the PC1640, which had 640 KB of RAM and an EGA-compatible graphics chipset, acquired from Paradise Systems, integrated into the main board of the machine,[11][7] although only the ECD model could display all EGA modes.

Part of it was explained because the basic model (one floppy drive, no hard disk) launched for £399, which made it one of the first cheap PCs in Europe.

This price, which initially increased to £450,[12]: 100  was restored in September 1987 amidst adjustments in Amstrad's PC range.

Although the Amstrad PC1512 and PC1640 had to compete against faster AT-type architectures at the time of their release, they were sufficiently powerful to run office software popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including WordPerfect 5.1, WordStar, Microsoft Word 4 and 5 for DOS, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, Matlab, and the database program dBase III+ as well as Ashton-Tate's Framework II integrated office suite.

The PC1512 significantly helped open up the European PC market to consumers as well as businesses, and Amstrad's advertising of the PC1512 was aimed at homes rather than offices.

[14] Video output was compatible with the CGA standard, with an extension allowing all 16 colours to be used in the 640×200 graphics mode.

The CPU of both the PC1512 and the later PC1640 was an 8 MHz Intel 8086, which was sufficient for playing The Secret of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Prince of Persia.

This allowed the user to make the machine beep quietly, or silently, from boot time onwards.