Advent Lifestyle

Advent's Lifestyle PC is a stylish-looking machine that can serve either as a thin tower system or as a compact, if rather long, desktop.

Inside the Lifestyle PC is a 2GHz Pentium 4, sitting on an ECS L4S5MG3 micro ATX motherboard.

Backing this up is a 256MB stick of PC2100 DDR memory sitting in one of the two Dimm slots, but for those wanting more performance the board also supports 533MHz front-side bus processors and DDR333 memory.

The integrated AGP 4x graphics are powered by the Sis 651 chip which shares system memory. The motherboard does have an AGP slot, but the size of the Lifestyle limits any card you'd want to include to a half-height one.

Those with a plethora of USB devices will be kept happy, as the Lifestyle has five USB2 ports - four to the rear and another behind a door in the front fascia, as well as a Firewire and two audio ports. A second Firewire port is housed in the rear panel.

Internal storage is provided by a 5,400rpm 40GB Samsung drive, while the Samsung CD-RW/DVD hard drive hides behind another dropdown panel in the front fascia.

What is surprising is to find both a PC Card slot and a Memory Stick slot to go with the normal floppy drive, so all kinds of removable media are catered for.

The Lifestyle also comes with a modem and 10/100 Ethernet. Advent supplies a decent enough 15in Trigem TG1550 TFT monitor and Microsoft Works 7.

The Advent Lifestyle is an interesting twist on an old problem - desk space. It does, however, suffer from very poor graphics performance when using the internal graphics, but even so is perfectly good for office applications.

SPECS

• 2GHz Intel P4 processor
• 256MB of memory
• Samsung 40GB hard drive
• 32x 10x 40x 12x CD-RW/DVD combo drive
• 64MB onboard graphics
• Trigem TG1550 TFT monitor
• XP; Microsoft Works 7
• 1yr on-site warranty

£999 (£850 ex VAT)

CONTACT: PC World