NEC may not quite share the same spotlight as Dell when it comes to business machines, but it's been doing solid business all these years, and the latest PowerMate shows that it has enough to give the other big guns something to think about.

Based on a slew of new technologies from Intel and coming preinstalled with Windows Vista, is this the perfect upgrade to your existing stock? Well, potentially - if your needs have developed with the times.

Apart from the centrally located power button, the facia boasts a pair of USB ports and the standard microphone and headphone jacks. The rear of the PC has the usual gamut of standard connectors and ports, including four USB ports, making for a generous total of six.

NEC is pitching this PC as the next level in platform manageability - a bold claim, but one that does have some backing thanks to Intel's vPro technology.

This is a broad range of technologies that enable admins to remotely access the PC over the network to perform everything from system diagnostics to waking the machine from a sleep state to install patches. It's a powerful set of tools that could mean that less time is spent at the end users' PCs solving trivial problems, because so much can be handled remotely.

To a certain degree, we're still waiting on software that can exercise all of the features of vPro, but with compatible back-end systems. Components such as AMT (Active Management Technology) enable the creation of hardware and software filters that can alert the IT team to problems.

The ability to quarantine infected machines on the network, thus stopping malicious code spreading, is clearly going to be a boon, as is the ability to remotely boot machines and update them.

Such an environment does sound like a step towards an IT nirvana, but in order to create such a setup, you're going to need to replace all of your corporate machines, and this is where the problem of cost comes in - this is far from the cheapest box money can buy.

It is, however, far more powerful than your average corporate machine, packing components that system builders would normally eye up for more versatile entertainment PCs.