Not everybody wants a thumping great PC on their desktop and there's a growing trend to provide slimline or low profile PCs as alternatives to the standard mini-tower. Evesham's Prestige VP Plus is one such system and does a good job of reducing the size without cutting back on the hardware specification too much.

The black case with silver trimmings sits neatly under the 17-inch Cibox monitor and has space for externally-accessible 5.25 and 3.5-inch drives and another two 3.5-inch devices inside. Evesham has fitted an 18-speed DVD rewriter in the 5.25-inch bay and one of the internal bays takes a 160GB SATA hard drive. It would be good to see a memory card reader in the empty 3.5-inch bay, but this isn't vital in a business PC.

The machine is based around an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor, which has two cores running at 1.8GHz and 2MB of L2 cache. Couple this with 1GB of main memory and you have a PC that's more than capable of running most modern business applications.

Graphics output is provided by an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3000 chip on the motherboard, which won't break any records for 3D performance but is enough for typical 2D applications up to the Photoshop level. The picture is delivered to the aforementioned Cibox monitor; not a particularly well known name. This example gives a good, sharp picture, though, and is easy to set up and adjust.

The PC is well endowed with sockets, having a total of eight USB 2 and two FireWire ports, along with a parallel port and audio jacks front and rear.

Evesham supplies the Prestige VP Plus with a copy of Windows Vista Business, but also includes Works 8.5 and Roxio Creator 9XE, the latter handling most common CD and DVD tasks. It's a bit strange to have Works rather than Office on a machine such as this, but it's done to save cost and does make the upgrade cheaper than buying Office from scratch. The rather irritating Bullguard security system is also installed, which nags you to take up a full subscription after its three-month free-trial ends.

Performance is quite nippy for a business machine of this type and it gave a PC Mark index of over 4,300, so well up to running Vista without breaking a sweat. The system is completed by a Logitech keyboard and mouse and, although both of these are corded, at least you don't have to worry about flat batteries.

The Evesham Prestige VP Plus is a modern, low-profile, small/home office or business PC, with a strong specification and plenty of performance muscle for business and, possibly, some leisure tasks. It's not a games PC, so might not be so useful as a home office machine, but as a general-purpose business workhorse it gives a very good account of itself.