Pelham Sloane PS1500

Walk into a room and see the Pelham Sloane PS1500 sitting on a desk and you might think it's just a standard 15in TFT monitor. With the familiar sight of Windows XP on the screen and the keyboard and mouse on the desk, your first thought would appear to be correct, right?

Wrong. Take a look around for the PC base unit and you'll be left a little confused. The PS1500, you see, actually holds the PC in the rear of the screen to create a stylish, tiny computer that looks amazing.

For such a thin PC, we weren't expecting great specifications, so we were pleasantly surprised when we discovered that the PS1500 is built around an Intel 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor. This is a fairly meaty offering and will lap up any task you might throw at it.

It's backed up by 256Mb of memory, which is enough for Windows XP but is starting to look a little paltry by modern standards.

You also immediately lose 16Mb of this, as the Intel Extreme graphics chip needs to use system memory to work. It's not very powerful and will struggle to play games but for standard windows applications, it will easily do the job. It's good enough to power the 15in display to its maximum resolution of 1024 x 768, where the monitor displayed a really sharp picture.

The PS1500 comes with a 40Gb hard disk that is enough for most people's everyday storage needs but if you plan to store large numbers of digital pictures or music files, all the free space will soon disappear. A bigger hard disk would have been preferable.

There are some other strange aspects to the system which certainly gave us reason to pause. Take the onboard 5.1 sound card, which can be used to pump out glorious surround sound, for one. This sounds like a great feature but there's no real way of using it to its full potential. Pelham Sloane provides only a CD-ROM drive so you can't play DVD movies, which would make the most of the surround sound. We would have preferred a DVD/CD-RW combination drive instead, as this would make the PS1500 great for watching films on and provide a form of removable storage.

Another gripe is that although everything is built into the tiny case, Pelham Sloane has put all of the connectors, bar a couple of USB 2 ports, underneath the screen. Even the power button is wedged under here so it's difficult to turn the PS1500 on and off.

Don't expect much in the way of software either, as the PS1500 doesn't come with anything other than Windows XP. You will have to go out and buy some office software if you want to type the odd letter or create an spreadsheet for your Christmas list.

As a pure style PC the PS1500 is an interesting specimen. The small size will appeal to people short on space or who want an attractive PC to stick in the front room. However, its lack of software and a DVD drive means that it's not quite the everyman entertainment centre that you'd hope for. This is strictly a style PC for work and not play.

Contact: Pelham Sloane 020 7349 2090
www.pelhamsloane.com