Pelham Sloane PS1500M

A UK manufacturer, Pelham Sloane mainly sells to integrators that build PCs into medical, kiosk, and home automation systems. As such, the PS1500M differs fundamentally from the other two all-in-ones we tested for our June roundup. The main difference is the 15-inch LCD touch screen. (A 17-inch model is available as well.) The touch screen lets you control the PC without mouse or keyboard. You move the cursor by touching the screen, and you right-click by touching a special area of the screen. A pop-up screen keyboard permits keyboard entry. Our review unit came with a standard wired keyboard and mouse--fortunately. Though the touch screen facilitates mouse control, we found entering text on the screen a frustrating process.

Our review unit came with a stylish stand, but alternatively you can mount the system on any VESA stand (including wall mounts) designed for monitors. As a result, you can easily mount the PS1500M on a wall, under a kitchen cabinet, or on an arm that would let it be pushed out of the way when not needed. Not counting the stand, the system is less than 3 inches thick. One other nice touch: A button on the screen bezel turns off the screen, but leaves the PC running; that's a convenient way to save power and we didn't see anything like it on the other all-in-ones.

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