Simply has made some moves to distinguish its machine from the mainstream of PCs in this price bracket. It starts with a 10-speed DVD-ROM drive, rather than a CD, and includes an LS120 Superdisk in place of a floppy drive. This 120MB removable media drive provides similar facilities to a Zip drive, but is backward compatible with regular floppy disks, too. Permanent storage has that bit extra, with a capacity of 14.2GB in the hard drive.

Another Celeron-based machine, the Systemax has a 600MHz device at its core, giving a notional speed edge over the 533MHz devices in some of the other machines. 64MB of main memory is adequate for this sort of machine.

With another MicroATX-based system board, this system has the same problems with expansion as some of the others, with no ISA or AGP slots. Graphics again come from an Intel 810 chipset and run into a 17-inch CTX monitor, which gives a good picture, but isn't quite as sharp as the ADi or NEC devices.

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Sound plays back through a pair of Genie speakers which are only average, but Simply provides a good software bundle, including WorksSuite 2000 and four reasonable games. Overall a machine with a good core specification and above average software.