Pelham Sloane PS1500M

Our $2548 test system had good selection of ports on the bottom of the case: two USB 2.0 ports, a component video-out port, and parallel and serial ports. You also get two PC Card slots on a PCI card mounted inside the case; Pelham Stone offers a number of options to replace the PC Card slots, including more USB ports, serial ports, and wireless networking.

But you can't upgrade any of the components in the case. Though the optical drive (an 8X rewritable DVD drive in our test system) is a notebook model, you can't remove or upgrade it; and in our test system it repeatedly got stuck. After ejecting the drive tray, I had to use a fingernail to pry it out before removing the disc. The fan on the back of the system runs constantly (other systems slow down the fan when the system doesn't need extensive cooling) and had an annoying high-pitched whine.

The system is built around a 1.7-GHz Pentium-M notebook processor with 512MB of DDR333 SDRAM. The unit scored a 75 on PC WorldBench 5--the slowest time posted by any of the all-in-one systems we tested. But to be fair, this is fast enough for general use, and obviously you wouldn't buy this system to handle high-performance tasks such as playing games or crunching numbers.

Upshot: This all-in-one with a touch screen could be a good option for a kitchen or other built-in system, but it's not suitable for general use.

Richard Baguley