Product Reviews

There's so much to download now, from movies to music - even computer games. The thing is, all these downloads soon fill up your hard disk. That's where PC Nextday's Downloader PC comes in - it has over a terabyte (1024GB) of hard disk space.

Give me Viiv

As well as having the most storage space we've ever seen in a computer, the Downloader PC is also compatible with Intel's new Viiv 'standard'. Regular readers will know that Viiv, billed as being all about multimedia playback, in fact just means that you get a very fast PC with a dual-core Intel processor - and that this computer will come with Microsoft Windows Media Center installed. Not interesting enough to call a new 'standard', but not to be sneezed at either.

Windows Media Center - or something like it - is a necessity for a PC like this as it means you can access all the files you've downloaded using the handy remote control. Media Center's easy-to-use interface makes browsing your music, videos and digital photos much quicker and more visually appealing than it would be on a normal PC.

The Downloader PC also comes with a digital TV tuner, so you can watch, pause and record all 30 Freeview channels. Of course, not everyone wants to watch TV

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at their PC, in the living room. So the Zoostorm comes with both wired, and unusually for a desktop PC, wireless networking adapters. It's designed to be used as a home entertainment hub, beaming music and video to receivers around the home, which are plugged into devices like the hi-fi and your TV. It can send content to any Media Center extender, such as the Xbox 360, and any uPNP compatible device, like the Philips Streamium SLA5520 we review on page 44.

More than a media centre

Thankfully, there's more to this PC than just Windows Media Center and a massive amount of storage. There's a powerful GeForce 7600GT graphics card, easily capable of playing modern 3D games at the screen's native 1280 x 1024 resolution at high detail levels. The processor is a muscular Intel Pentium D 940, and there's 2GB of RAM too.

Build quality is good. There's plenty of space inside for upgrades, should you ever need to upgrade. There are even two memory slots free and on the outside there are no less than seven USB2 ports and a FireWire port. There's also a memory card reader, so copying photos from your digital camera will be a cinch.

The mouse and keyboard are fine, but the monitor gave us some cause for concern, especially given the home cinema aspirations of the PC. Dark and light colours lacked distinction, so shadows and brightly lit areas look flat and dull rather than richly textured. We also noticed an area of fuzziness towards the left of the screen, which is very off-putting. It's not a bad monitor, it's just not the best for the job.

We were also concerned with the amount of noise this system made. As a home media hub, it will be on all the time and when it's four hard disks start working hard - as they will when you're streaming video around the home, they really start to rattle.