It may come as a surprise, but few computer manufacturers design PCs for those who simply want to run office applications and access the internet, and definitely don't want to play games. You can, of course, get a mail order company to make one up to your specifications, but that's another matter. What you want is a ready made, ready designed PC with everything thought out for you. And that's exactly what you get with the Gateway Astro.

Anyone of a certain generation is immediately going to recognise Astro as the name of the dog in the cartoon show, The Jetsons. Gateway isn't associating the Astro with that cartoon, but you can opt for the Rugrats Astro, produced in conjunction with Nickelodeon. It comes with a range of Rugrats titles, a Rugrats CD holder and a rather cute Rugrats mouse mat.

What makes the Astro stand out from the crowd isn't a few cardboard cut-outs, but the fact that it's an all-in-one PC. You get a monitor with a CDRom and floppy drive in the base, along with a pair of integrated speakers. The only bits that need connecting are the USB keyboard and the USB mouse which connects to the keyboard.

It's an understatement to say that setting up the Astro is a doddle. The only tricky bit is connecting to the internet, but this is simply a matter of plugging the modem into the phone line. Should all this prove too much, Gateway also provides a poster-sized colour quick set-up guide to help you.

Gateway has thrown away all the old bits and pieces like parallel ports, serial ports, and ISA slots, and stripped the computer right back to basics. It's still possible to upgrade by adding components and peripherals via the USB ports, but it's not possible to actually get inside the computer.

This means you can't add expansion cards, like graphics or sound, at a later date. However, that's no great hardship to the sort of buyer the Astro is aimed at, as they wouldn't want to open up their PC anyway. Neither is it such a problem that 3D graphics are provided by the integrated Intel 810 chipset instead of a dedicated AGP graphics chip.

This sort of graphics set-up will run all office applications just fine, and it will even run most of the current 3D games. What it won't do is run games produced in, say, a year's time. But if you're into playing games on your PC you won't be looking at the Astro in the first place.

Bearing in mind that this is definitely a budget PC, we were still a little disappointed with the performance. The 400Mhz Celeron processor is slow by today's standards, and 64Mb of memory is well below the minimum 128Mb we'd recommend. While you probably wouldn't notice the difference when running a word processor or spreadsheet, for example, this set-up gave the Astro an abysmal score in our performance tests.

What we also found unacceptable was the size of the hard disk. At 5.1Gb, this is much smaller than we'd expect to find, even on a budget PC.

We were also unimpressed with the monitor. Keeping in mind that we only saw one Astro, and it was an early model, we tried not to judge it too harshly. It failed a number of our monitor tests, however. Horizontal colour registration was slightly out, which meant that black text, for example, had a slight yellow tinge. The monitor also suffered a little from ghosting, which is where you can see a faint replica of an image, similar to that on a television set when the reception is poor.

Later this year, the Astro will be shipping with a DVDRom drive instead, and for home users that may be worth waiting for.

Contact Gateway 0800 973132