Lenovo Ideacentre B305

The idea of an all-in-one computer, such as the Lenovo B305, is simple: it’s a PC that can be used by the whole family and takes up less space that usual. Nowadays they usually have touch-sensitive screens so they can be controlled by touch.

Straight from the box however, the B305, which is available from PC World shops, didn’t make a good first impression.

It isn’t the nicest-looking computer we’ve seen: the finish felt cheap, very much appearing like the shiny black plastic that it is. Also, for some reason, the keyboard and mouse both have small sections that have been painted bright orange - we couldn’t quite work out why.

We were also disappointed that the keyboard and mouse weren’t wireless or even particularly good quality. The keys were not very pleasant to type on and the mouse didn’t feel sturdy. Certainly for the price of the whole product we would have expected better peripherals.

With a 21in touchscreen display and built-in wireless networking the B305 is certainly well-prepared for the role of a family entertainment PC, and it fulfilled most of the required tasks pretty well.

The touchscreen was both responsive and accurate although as with similar computers there seems little point to it: there’s no worthwhile software that takes advantage of the touch technology.

Lenovo has bundled in some of its own software, one which allows users to set a 'touch password', which involves tapping pictures in certain places on the screen to log in, instead of a password. This sounded clever, but the program made it unnecessarily hard to log back in, so it wasn’t much use.

The system we reviewed ran on an AMD Athlon II X3 400e processor with 4GB of memory and a 640GB hard disk. Thanks to the ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card, recent and demanding games such as Crysis ran without too many problems but we had to turn down the quality settings to make it work. There is a DVD writer but it can’t play Blu-ray movie discs, which is a shame, and the writer felt clunky and cheap.

The screen can display high-definition video in the full 1080p resolution, which is great but which made the Blu-ray omission even more of a shame. The built-in speakers weren’t good quality or very loud – you’ll need to plug in headphones, an amp or other speakers to get the best results.

There are six USB sockets, a wired network connection, webcam and microphone, memory card reader and a Firewire socket for connecting camcorders. On the front of the screen are brightness controls but confusingly, the only volume button is a mute control on the keyboard, so you have to use the software volume control in Windows, which is irritating. Also, the unit has a small Bluetooth logo on the front panel but doesn’t actually offer Bluetooth connections.

PC World sells two models as the B305 – this one and another that’s £20 more expensive with a faster processor and larger hard disk.

The price of this PC a little high and its poor peripherals let it down. The cheaper all-in-one Samsung U200 and the more powerful Apple iMac are both better value.