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The PC has been desperately struggling to shed it's beige box image, escape the spare room and set itself up in the lounge as the king of home entertainment. So far, things haven't exactly gone to plan and the PC has failed to usurp the current entertainment world order. With Hi-Grade's Xperion 1700-2660 it is getting closer.
The Xperion passes the first test - attractiveness - with flying colours. It doesn't have the boxy, dull hallmarks of your typical PC, so putting it on display is no problem. It's a sleek, all-in-one beast, cunningly designed so that the wireless keyboard can be clipped onto the front of the screen or stored when not in use and its black and grey colour scheme looks great.
However, style isn't everything, so, fortunately, the Xperion delivers top-notch performance too. Based on a 2.66GHz Intel Pentium 4 and backed up by 512Mb of memory it did well in our system tests and is as capable as your average PC.
The built-in 17in TFT screen is just as good and displays a really sharp picture at a resolution of 1280 x 1024. It's powered by an ATI Radeon 9000 graphics card, which is a good card and capable of running any current game.
Mounted next to the screen are a couple of speakers, which produce good sound for their size. For better quality, though, you can plug in a set of surround-sound speakers and use them to watch movies on the DVD/CD-RW combo drive.
For a system that's built into a TFT monitor, we were impressed with the 120Gb hard disk, which is more than enough to cope with most people's storage needs.
As the Xperion is built to be an entertainment PC, there's a few surprises above the usual range of ports including a memory card reader, TV/radio tuner and a PC Card slot, which is unusual on a desktop PC.
Using the bundled software you can watch TV, time-shift record and even program the Xperion to record your favourite programmes. Unfortunately, the software is a little clunky and is quite difficult to use.
So far, there is nothing particularly special about this package, as we have seen other PCs that can do the same thing. Where the Xperion almost makes it as the king of home entertainment is with its instant-play feature. Just use the provided remote control and you can play DVDs, CDs, MP3s or watch TV without having to start Windows first.
It just takes a few seconds to switch modes and is quite impressive. But it's not quite there yet. You can only perform very basic tasks in each mode. For example, if you are watching TV you can record the current program but you can't select a previous recording to view. For that you need to go into Windows and control it from there. The same is true of the other applications.
The fact that you still have to rely on Windows and can't do everything from the remote control is very annoying. This restriction means that the Xperion isn't quite ready to replace your existing equipment. That said, it's still a good PC and the instant-play features mean that you can at least watch TV or a DVD movie with minimum hassle.
Contact: Hi-Grade 020 8532 6115
www.hi-grade.com
See also:
Movies and music at the touch of a button from Iridium - but how does the PC fare? 02 Dec 2003
Style and performance that grab your attention, but it's the price that makes your pulse race. 20 Nov 2003
A beast of a PC packed with good hardware, but will the general PC user find everything they need? 04 Nov 2003
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