This is designed for the living room and aimed at the budget-conscious buyer. Microsoft’s Media Center may have arrived some time ago, but it’s not until the low-cost PC suppliers start selling these systems that you know they are here to stay.

The Tiny Media Center SL is proof that OEMs are beginning to give Microsoft’s favourite operating system of the moment a shove in the direction of the mass market. Once the VAT man and the courier have taken their share (Tiny computers cannot be collected), this PC costs £738, a price designed to hook budget-conscious users.

As specs go, the SL looks reasonable value. The AMD Athlon 64 3500 has a clock speed of 2.19GHz and is backed up by 512MB of Double Data Rate RAM, with empty slots inside the case to boost this to 1GB. Graphics and sound are on-board, so digital entertainment on this PC is more TV and film than power gaming. A Sysmark 04 score of 156 highlights another potential problem – we would have expected it to be 180 or higher – and made us wonder whether this system is little more than a glorified TV tuner and DVD player.

The system’s 200GB hard disk may seem small compared with other Media Centers we have reviewed, but most of those tipped over the £1,000 mark and the target audience at this price is likely to be satisfied. There are four USB2 ports hidden under a flap at the front, with another four and a Firewire socket at the rear.

Other highlights include a slot-loading, dual-layer DVD writer, plus a wireless mouse and keyboard.