Labs

If any colour can claim to be more boring than beige, it's grey. Still, if you're planning to hide your PC under a desk, it makes sense to scrimp on a basic case to squeeze a decent system into your budget. And the Advent certainly looks basic.

Of course, it's what lies beneath that counts, and for such an affordable PC the T9608 seems fairly well endowed. At the heart of the system is a decent 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500, the same processor as in the more ambitious Cyberpower system. Here, though, it's running at its standard out-of-the-box speed rather than having been overclocked, so performance is rather less imposing.

The Advent also has only 1GB of RAM to call on, which can't help but hold it back in memory-intensive

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tasks such as photo or video editing, or simply running lots of applications at once. Even so, it's sprightly enough to cope fine with everyday tasks in Windows Vista, and the 250GB hard disk provides adequate storage space.

Since the system itself is such an obviously price-conscious affair, there's room in the meagre budget for a good monitor, and the supplied 20 inch LG widescreen, with a resolution of 1680x1050 pixels, will appeal to those looking to play video or watch TV on their PC. So it's a shame a TV tuner card isn't included, though it's an easy upgrade to make, whether internally or via USB. In fact, you don't get any extras at all with the T9608, except for a rather cheap and nasty mouse and keyboard.

Benchmark results were unremarkable - better than the Very PC and Philips systems, but quite a bit slower than the rest of the pack. Gaming performance was as we'd expect from the lowly 128MB nVidia GeForce 7300 graphics card, which is to say, not very good. So, overall, performance is a weak point.

A slightly faster processor, an extra gigabyte of RAM (which you could add for £20), a better mouse and keyboard, or a little extra polish here or there might have swayed us, but as it stands the Advent, though the cheapest machine on test, doesn't look particularly good value.