Carrera Media Center Lite review

Carrera's chunky silver case contains our first ever Windows XP Media Center system. But does Microsoft's new baby live up to the hype?

Features

The Media Center edition of Windows XP has been made especially for living room PCs. It's basically Windows XP with extra features running on top, and has been designed to make your PC as easy to use for entertainment as your satellite box, TV or stereo. For a detailed look at the new system's features, see the box 'Understanding Media Center' on page 56.

Media Center's best feature is undoubtedly its TV recording function. It's far better than a conventional video recorder, because setting up a recording is a snap - there's no puzzling over TV guides and cryptic LCD displays. Unlike some digital recorders, though, Media Center can't suggest programmes you might like based on those you've already recorded. In our tests, it also failed to cope with schedule delays.

We found the TV tuner surprisingly tricky to set up. Media Center tries to work out the correct UHF frequencies for your area based on your postcode - but in our case, it got them wrong, so we had to search the Web to find out what to enter. Media Center is not available as an upgrade, so the only way you can get it is by buying a new PC. Most manufacturers are cagey about how much they pay to install it, but Carrera is obviously feeling the pinch in a system at this price - it has had to cut back in other areas. You don't get a CD writer or a separate graphics card, and although you get office software, it's the basic Ability Office suite. There's no surround sound, either.

Ergonomics

The Carrera's 15in NEC DV5800 flat-panel monitor suffered from uneven brightness and dull, muddy colours. It's not ideal for video playback, so it's a good thing the system's nVidia MCE TV card has an S-video output to connect to a TV.

The Coolermaster case looks great, but it's relatively bulky compared to those of the other systems, so it might be harder to find a place to put it. The case fan is also quite loud.

Expansion

The advantage of this system's full-size case is that there's plenty of room for upgrades. There are two free PCI slots for internal upgrades, two free memory sockets, a spare hard disk bay and an AGP slot for a graphics card. There's even a spare external drive bay, so you could fit an extra CD or DVD drive.

Performance

This system's 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor has Intel's HyperThreading technology, which means it can behave as if it were two processors running in parallel, especially when running software that's written to make use of the feature. HyperThreading can increase a PC's performance when it's doing several things at once. This isn't fully reflected in our benchmarks, which run a series of tasks one after the other. Even so, the Carrera scores a respectable 1,031. The PC's integrated 64MB Intel graphics managed only 2,913 on 3DMark. That's enough to play 3D games, but it won't run the latest releases smoothly.

Overall

With a few reservations, we like the way Media Center works, but we're not convinced it's worth compromising on features and ergonomics to get it.