Product Reviews

This PC would be a great buy if it were £100 cheaper. As it is, you can get more for your money.

Features

We weren't entirely convinced of the educational merits of a webcam, but it's not a bad extra all the same. The Lexmark Z23e photo printer, on the other hand, is a really solid piece of kit, great for printing out essays and getting creative. What's more, with a 40Gb hard drive and 256Mb of RAM there shouldn't be any currently available software you can't run.

Ergonomics

The Hansol 920P monitor that came with this system suffered from misconvergence, when the red, blue and green parts that make up an image don't line up correctly. On the left-hand side of the screen, the

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effect was so bad it was clearly visible to the naked eye. This is a real shame as it's great to get a 19in screen, and the power regulation was rock solid. The Microsoft keyboard and mouse were, as usual, well-made and comfortable to use.

Expansion

Mesh gets a big pat on the back for leaving us three PCI slots free and giving us four USB ports to play with. It's a pity there's no space for a Zip drive, but you could always go for an external one or use an adapter to fit one in the 5.25in bay. If your creative bent extends to music making, this is also handy for a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum, with all its extra knobs and sockets for budding musicians.

Performance

The nForce is a great chipset: it provides increased power, surround sound, a network connector and decent integrated graphics in one neat package. But at the end of the day its GeForce2 MX graphics core just can't compete with the faster graphics cards in the other machines.

Overall

Performance isn't the focus in this group test, but you still want the most you can get for your money, which is too bad for this machine. More importantly, if you're staring at a screen for hours on end while writing your thesis, you want it to be a top-quality display - which the Mesh's Hansol 920P isn't.