Product Reviews

Evesham's MiniPC Plus bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple's Mac mini and will appeal to people who are short on space but still want a stylish and quiet PC.

Like the Mac mini, the MiniPC Plus comes without a mouse, keyboard or monitor. It also lacks any legacy ports, so you'll need a USB keyboard and mouse. However, these would take up both USB2 ports, so a matching USB2 hub would have been welcome.

A 2GHz Pentium M 750 processor and 512MB of memory power the MiniPC. Its decent performance scores are more comparable with those of similarly specced notebooks than full-blown desktop PCs. The case has no room for dedicated graphics, so the MiniPC uses onboard Intel graphics,

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which aren't good enough for games.

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is becoming a more popular choice of operating system, so we weren't surprised to see it here. Evesham doesn't supply a remote control, but this isn't too much of a disappointment as the 80GB hard disk isn't big enough to use the MiniPC as a huge MP3 and video store. The 8X DVD writer isn't very fast, and being a slot-loading model will be tricky to replace.

Despite the warning on the bottom of the MiniPC Plus, it's possible to pry open the case and upgrade the RAM or add a mini-PCI WiFi card.

Unfortunately, the MiniPC Plus is pricy, and £200 more expensive than the most expensive Mac mini configuration, which has WiFi and Bluetooth. Better-value computers with comparable performance also include larger systems that come in more expandable Shuttle XPC cases. A cheaper MiniPC configuration is available for £499 including VAT, but that model has an even smaller 40GB hard disk and a slower 1.4GHz Celeron M processor.

If size is an issue, or your primary concern is pure style, the MiniPC is a fine choice. It also has a few real advantages over the Mac mini: it runs Windows, it supports a much wider range of peripherals and there's a wider choice of software available for it.