The eMachines range is the budget brand from a newly reinvigorated Gateway and the E3042, while not a technology leader, certainly leads on price. You can buy this machine for £199 without a monitor or £299 with a 17-inch LCD.

The mini-tower case is neatly styled in black and silver with a 16x dual-layer DVD rewriter at the top - an annoyingly buzzy one in the review machine - which should be able to read and write just about anything. Below this is the large, illuminated power button and at the bottom, under a slide-up cover, are two USB 2 sockets and mic and headphone ports. There are two spare 5.25-inch bays for additional drives.

At the rear things are pretty much as you would expect, with single serial and parallel ports, four more USB 2 sockets, a network connection and audio sockets for 5.1-channel output. The four expansion slot back-plates conceal two standard PCI slots, plus a single x1 PCI Express slot and an x16 PCI Express for a graphics adapter.

Graphics output is handled from the system board by an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chip and the main processor is a Celeron D 352, a 64-bit chip running at 3.2GHz. It's backed up by 512MB of DDR2 memory and there's an 80GB hard drive for fixed storage.

What eMachines describes as a 'premium multimedia keyboard' has custom keys for frequently-used functions such as e-mail, Web and cut-and-paste, as well as DVD playback functions. The ball mouse has two buttons and a click-wheel.

At first sight, applications in the software bundle look impressive, until you realise most of them are time-limited trials. There's 90 days of McAfee Internet Security, 60 days of Microsoft Office Standard Edition and 30 days of Microsoft Digital Image 2006 Starter Edition.

What you do get as full versions are Microsoft Works 8.5, PowerDVD for movie playback and BigFix for troubleshooting. The E3042 is supplied with Windows XP Home, but is Vista-compatible. Overall a good mix of software, though we'd like to see a year's McAfee cover.

Under test the E3042 scored 2,225 on PCMark 2005, which isn't a spectacular result but is more than sufficient to run most mainstream office applications. Graphics output may prove jerky running the latest, near-photo-realistic shooters, but should still be fine for most entertainment software. It'll certainly have no problem with DVD movie playback.

The E3042 is a low-cost, high-value machine ideal for home, student or basic office use. While it won't be graphically strong enough for the rabid games player, for most other uses it should be more than adequate. Whether you choose to buy it with or without the accompanying 17-inch LCD display, this is a fine entry-level system.