Thanks to a robust, low-cost AMD chip and a healthy portion of system memory, HP's Pavilion All-in-One MS225 ably spans the divide between hobbled Nettops and pricier Intel-based all-in-ones. If performance is top of mind, we'd point you to a true budget desktop. Otherwise, the manageable, self-contained design of a smaller all-in-one has a lot of appeal, and it's worth paying a small premium for this $599 HP, whose components are robust enough to handle the day-to-day tasks that confound its competition.
An 18.4-inch display and all-matte-black housing/gray stand combination make the Pavilion All-in-One MS225 an approachable, unobtrusive piece of hardware. It's easy to imagine it perched on a desk or tucked away on a countertop. The screen isn't touch-enabled, and the included mouse and keyboard are both wired devices, so you'll either need to endure some traditional input device clutter, or spring for a wireless desktop set. The good news is that it does come with 802.11n wireless networking, so at least you won't have to worry about running an Ethernet cable through your kitchen.
To the input method, we don't expect to find touch input in a capable $599 all-in-one (at least in the first half of the year). We're actually very skeptical of touch-input in desktops, but HP's TouchSmart all-in-one line stands out for its superb recipe software that can scrape and organize recipes from a wide variety of popular Web sites. We wish HP had extended that software to this system. A mouse-driven version of its Recipe Box program would be perfect in this countertop-friendly design.
The Averatec D1133 we reviewed back in September has been around for a while. Averatec offers a new, Windows 7-based model for $599 (currently on sale for $479), but aside from the new operating system, the hardware is the same. From a value standpoint, HP gives you a larger hard drive and more system RAM, the latter of which has a noticeable performance impact.
We're not able to speak to the streaming video capabilities of the Averatec system, as we only tested it with a DVD, which we found satisfactory. The HP's video playback quality for DVDs was also fine, and it handled Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and HD movie trailers with no trouble. The HP's audio output was perhaps a little louder than the Averatec's, but by no means would it fill a large room. Between the soft audio and 18.4-inch displays common to both systems, neither is a digital media stand-out, but they should be enough to provide decent background entertainment or up-close viewing.
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