Review: PC Nextday Zoostorm 1-3301 Versatile PC

PC Nextday’s Zoostorm provides very good value for money, despite sloppy initial presentation.

The silver and black front panel is made out of light plastic that rattles when you tap it, though thankfully the main body of the machine is more solidly constructed. No manuals are provided either, so first-time users will have to work things out for themselves. A couple of handy USB ports and audio connectors are to be found on the front of the machine, but none of these is clearly labelled.

Once up and running, the Zoostorm performed well and provides a good range of features. It’s based on a Pentium processor running at 2.8GHz, which gives the PC plenty of raw horsepower. Some of these low-cost PCs start to struggle when it comes to handling 3D graphics, but the Zoostorm performed well in our gaming tests and should be able to handle even the latest 3D games.

Video editing, digital photography and straightforward word processing or web surfing should be handled with ease. We were pleased to see that it has a full 1GB of memory, along with a 250GB hard disk. The former boosts performance during video editing or digital photography work, while the hard disk provides plenty of space.

A video connector on the back of the machine allows you to play your video projects on a TV set or to record them onto video tape. Alternatively, use the DVD recorder to create your own DVD disks – although the Nero software supplied is rather basic.

We were also a little disappointed that the Zoostorm doesn’t have a Firewire connector. PC Nextcay compensate for that omission by providing a decent set of stereo speakers, and a series of slots for camera memory cards on the PC’s front panel.

The Zoostorm isn’t perfect. The poor documentation and lack of a Firewire port are both annoying little weaknesses, but they’re hardly major flaws, and the Zoostorm is a good all-round PC that will meet the needs of the majority of home users.

This article is part of a group test of budget desktop PCs.
Others are:
Watford Performa 3500+RV
PC Specialist Trident s500
Mesh D820 Value+
Evesham Axis STR Plus
Ambros Shuttle SS31T
The table can be read via our pdf download

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