PCs are widely regarded as the ugly red-headed stepchildren of real home cinema equipment. Huge, wheezing beige boxes, they are better suited to gathering dust in the second bedroom than lounging stylishly next to the flatscreen TV and surround speakers in your living room. Aren't they?

Not in this case. With the Mini PC Evesham has managed to shoehorn a real computer into an amazingly petite box. About six inches square and no more than a couple high, it owes one heck of a creative debt to the Mac Mini.

Unlike Apple's tiny machine, this is designed to be used as a media device. It comes pre-loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, which features Microsoft's lounge- and remote control- friendly Media Center application, making this both a Sky -style PVR and a hub for storing and playing back all your digital movies, music and photographs.

As well as being small, the PC looks cool, thanks to its blue power LED, brushed black frame and clean lines. There's no disc tray, only a slot that automatically pulls in CDs and DVDs.

Thanks to low fan noise and a vibration- damping rubber 'foot', it runs nice and quiet too. It's not totally silent, but what little noise there is isn't going to be heard over a film, TV show or audio track.

As you might imagine, there isn't much space on the back panel, so connectivity is a little more limited than on the average PC. There are only two video outputs here: DVI and S-video. The former supports high- definition resolutions and a VGA adaptor is also supplied, so hooking this up to a flatscreen TV or projector should be a cinch.

An HDMI output would have been handy, but you could always try a DVI-to- HDMI adaptor (and cross your fingers that your TV supports the right resolutions via HDMI - the Hitachi 37LD9700 screen I used didn't, surrounding the picture with a wide black border).

Audio options are similarly restricted to a two-channel 3.5mm line output and a mini optical output for digital surround sound. You also get a couple of USB ports, Firewire, an aerial input (but no loopthrough) for the built-in TV tuner and a single mic jack. While there's enough to do the job, it isn't a particularly AV-friendly selection, and the lack of any video inputs means you can't run a Sky or cable box through the system.

Save for a niftier, rejigged menu screen, Vista's version of Media Center is virtually identical to XP's. With its large text and icons, it's designed to be viewed on a screen from afar, and is accessible from the desktop at the push of a button on the supplied remote control. Alternatively, you can set it so Media Center starts up with the PC - select this option and you'll rarely have to see the rest of Vista, despite it running in the background.

Open up Media Center and you're presented with a range of options, including a DVD player, access to your music, video and photo libraries and live TV from the built-in DVB-T tuner. Accompanying the TV is a 14-day EPG serving up programme schedules and information. This works in a similar way to Sky 's EPG, allowing you to quickly set recordings for individual shows or even entire series.

With only one tuner here you can't watch one channel while recording another, which strikes me as something of a missed opportunity. Any recordings you do make go directly into a folder on the 100GB hard disk, and can be accessed easily from Media Center.