Product Reviews

Unless you're going to be blasting through the latest games or editing lots of video, you probably don't need a really powerful PC. If you're just after word processing and web browsing, PC Nextday's Zoostorm 1-2302 Economy PC could be just what you're after. It comes with a 17" LCD and costs less than £350, making it the cheapest PC with a decent-sized monitor that we've ever seen.

The Economy PC is more than capable of handling tasks such as web browsing and calculating spreadsheets, although, as expected, it coped less well with more strenuous tasks. Its 2.9GHz Celeron D 341 processor managed a respectable score in our video-encoding test, but the 512MB of RAM meant it wasn't as fast in our image-editing and multitasking tests. If you ever want to upgrade, though, the Economy PC has an LGA-775 motherboard, so you should find it easy to install a fast Pentium 4. There are only two RAM slots, one already filled, that can accommodate up to 2GB of memory. The presence of a free RAM slot is a mixed blessing, though, as it means this PC doesn't use dual-channel memory access, slowing down performance slightly.

The integrated S3 graphics aren't powerful enough for playing modern 3D games such as Doom 3 or Call of Duty 2, so you're stuck with Windows applications. You can upgrade the graphics,

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but unusually there's only an older AGP slot rather than a PCI Express slot. Even so, you should be able to fit a decent graphics card, such as the Nvidia 6800 GT, later and play some games. The integrated graphics have only a D-sub output, so you can't upgrade to a monitor connected by DVI.

The best surprise is the 17" AOC monitor; most cheap PCs ship with 15" LCDs. Aside from the extra screen size, you get an improved resolution of 1,280x1,024. The monitor had trouble displaying a smooth gradient in our colour and greyscale shading tests, though, and the whites were dingy, so it's not ideal for photographers on a budget. It's not the most flexible of displays, either, with only a basic tilt and no height adjustment. You'll also have to depend on the monitor's tinny built-in speakers, as a separate set isn't bundled. They're good enough for Windows' alert sounds, but not much else. However, you can add a surround-sound set, as the Economy PC has built-in 5.1 sound and the necessary analogue outputs.

The 80GB hard disk is big enough for a few photos and Office documents, but if you install a lot of programs or have a large MP3 library, you'll need to install a larger model into one of the five empty 31/2" drive bays. There's only one spare SATA port, but there are six USB2 ports for adding external hard disks. The keyboard and mouse are comfortable, and while the mouse has a scroll wheel it uses an old-fashioned ball mechanism, so we'd replace this if possible. As expected, the software bundle isn't extensive, but PowerDVD and Nero Express 6 are useful.

The Zoostorm 1-2302 Economy PC is powerful enough for most undemanding home and small office users, and is the cheapest PC we've seen with a 17" LCD monitor. The AGP slot might dissuade anyone who wants to upgrade to play games, but otherwise this is amazing value and would be ideal as a second PC for a family