Product Reviews

The stylish, retro-looking black M1000 may look like a piece of hi-fi equipment, but it's actually a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PC. Although it's relatively compact, the M1000 will need some space around it as it gets quite warm. As you'd expect for a PC that's designed to hook up to your TV, it ships without a monitor, but it comes with a remote control and a wireless keyboard with built-in trackball.

The keyboard feels surprisingly responsive, although you wouldn't want to write a book on it. The keyboard also has Media Center's green button, so you can use it to access your media. While the remote's range is more than acceptable, it has to remain within the infrared sensor's narrow line of sight on the right-hand side of the PC to work. Viewing and recording TV shows with the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) works well enough thanks to Microsoft's

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excellent interface.

While these features are common for all Media Center PCs, the M1000 has a couple of extras. First, a portable 21/2" hard disk enclosure is provided. This plugs into the specially designed slot on the front of the PC, but it can connect to any USB port. However, it doesn't come with a hard disk installed, so you'll have to buy and fit your own. The M1000 ships with two PCI analogue tuners, although you can swap these for two digital tuners instead.

It also uses a 1.73GHz Pentium M 740 mobile processor, which helps keep heat and noise to a minimum. It's not quite as powerful as a desktop processor, but it copes easily with its media-oriented tasks. Graphics performance from the nVidia GeForce 6600SE isn't great, but it's unlikely that you'd be playing games on this PC anyway.

The M1000 plays High Definition (HD) video, but given the current lack of HD content, this isn't yet a huge advantage. It has an abundance of input and output ports (including 7.1 channel surround sound and component video), but no SCART socket. It also has WiFi connectivity, which is great for music, but video content would be smoother over its Gigabit Ethernet port.

The M1000 can write recorded video to DVD but you will need plenty of patience as the built-in writer records at a maximum of only 4X speed and can't record to two-layer DVDs.

The poor DVD writer detracts slightly from what is otherwise a stylish Media Center PC.