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All-in-Ones

Another category of space savers, all-in-one PCs, don't take up much area on a desktop and also can be portable. Manufacturers such as Gateway, MPC, and Sony offer all-in-one PCs that are geared at users who need to save space and don't intend to upgrade components.

We took a look at the Gateway Profile 5XL. It weighs 25 pounds, and its small footprint takes up just a little more desk space than a piece of letter-size paper.

With all of the parts incorporated into one piece and no ugly power and video cords linking the monitor to the PC, the Profile 5XL is a good solution for users who require the quickest setup possible: Connect a few cords, press the power button, and you're good to go. Adding a wireless mouse and keyboard further cleans clutter off your desktop.

Like other small PCs, all-in-one systems allow little room for expansion or upgrades. To open the Profile 5XL, we had to use a screwdriver to remove four screws. Once we got inside, we found the motherboard perched vertically behind the LCD, stretching from near the base to almost the top of the monitor's back. Components and cords were tightly packed in the narrow space, making it a challenge just to add more RAM in the one open slot. Surprisingly, the Profile 5XL has one open 3-inch bay (for an extra hard drive, for example), but no expansion slots whatsoever.

Thankfully, the assortment of components and peripherals for all-in-ones can be first-rate. The Profile 5XL we examined came with a beautiful, integrated 19-inch LCD monitor, a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 processor, and a rewritable DVD drive. (Other lower-priced configurations provide slower processors, a CD-RW drive, and either a 15- or 17-inch LCD monitor.)

With one of Intel's faster CPUs and 1GB of RAM, the Profile 5XL achieved a respectable mark of 122 in our PC WorldBench 4 tests--about the same as other similarly configured systems but speedy, regardless. It performed a hair better than the Littlepc, but certainly not as well as the two tower systems we looked at.

The Profile 5XL we saw, with its 19-inch LCD monitor, costs about $2300. However, like the Littlepc, the lowest-priced Profile 5 model (with an integrated 15-inch LCD monitor) costs roughly $1100.