Absolute Gadget

Review: Advent AIO-100 nettop PC

Written by Rene Millman Thursday, 29 January 2009 11:49

With netbooks all the rage, some are trying mimic the success of these tiny computers on the desktop. Advent's latest attempt at these so-called "nettops" is worth a look in.

The AIO-100 is the company's answer to the Asus eee top computer, but in many ways better looking. As it is a nettop, don't expect a lot fo grunt under the hood. It comes with a 1.6GHz Atom N270 alongside 1GB of RAM. Don't go expecting this machine to do video editing and complex special effects. This is more a computer for internet surfing, email and word processing.

Out of the box, the AIO-100 looks good, boasting an 18.4-inch display with a resolution of 1680 by 945. While it doesn't have touchscreen capabilities like the eee Top, the larger screen more than makes up for this.

The keyboard and mouse are dinky affairs, in fact the keyboard seemed to be an oversized laptop one, but again felt good in use. The mouse feels a little in substanstial but workable.

The unit itself is slightly different to standard nettops. Rather than placing all the components behind the display, they are housed in a small chassis underneath. the display sits on top of an adjustable arm.

Here in the chassis are a variety of ports, mainly USB ones (five) plus an Ethernet port and audio connections. Hidden away at the side is a VGA port. On the other side is the dual-layer DVD writer which gives is one over the eee Top.

More on next page....{mospagebreak}As we stated earlier, the computer houses a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard disc and wireless Ethernet (802.11b/g but not draft-n).

It sports an Nvidia GeForce 9200M graphics chip, which is better than having one of those Intel integrated GMA945 efforts but don't expect to use the computer to play the latest games at top resolution.

That said, it is a great little computer and it runs Windows XP rather than the lamentable Vista. Its power consumption is low compared to other computers, taking 34W when maxxed out. The large screen and optical dirve are welcome additions too.

It costs £340 ex VAT so it's not going to give your bank manager any nightmares either. The machine is available from PC World.