Advent T12

This computer bears all the signs of being designed to be at the heart of the digital home. It has a digital TV tuner, Scart socket, surround sound, a large hard disk and a remote control. However, it doesn't come with Windows XP Media Center Edition, the special version of Windows designed for PCs exactly like this one.

This is down to cost: building a computer to handle media applications requires plenty of costly performance-enhancing components and Advent has provided such a specification at a price that undercuts many rivals' XP Media Center offerings.

The Pentium 4 550 HT processor, running at 3.4GHz, is capable and is supported by 512Mb of dual-channel memory. In our tests it came out a smidgen under par for this kind of set-up, but not enough to worry about.

Graphics are provided by an nVidia GeForce 6610XL card using PCI Express technology with both DVI and normal VGA outputs and meets requirements.

The screen is a 17in TFT and a combined digital-analogue tuner card is supplied, so if you live in a Freeview area you can enjoy the benefits but if not you can still pick up the standard analogue channels. If you don't want to connect it to the supplied monitor, you could always use one of the three supplied video outputs: Composite, S-Video and Scart.

The front panel also includes Composite, S-Video and phono audio inputs plus both large and miniature FireWire sockets. There is a multiple memory card reader mounted in a drive bay and the two optical drives - a DVD writer (all common formats except DVD-RAM) and a DVD-ROM drive - are mounted behind a plastic panel.

Add a 250Gb hard disk, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and you have a media centre in all but trademarked name.

Windows XP Home is supplied along with Cyberlink's PowerCinema suite, which provides many of the same media management functions of Media Center.

The downside is that as more products and services are aimed at Media Center PCs, you may have to work harder to keep up. You can still do the same things, but not in the clever, joined-up way that XP Media Center allows.