The Pavilion a1370a may not be the fastest or best-featured system on the market for its price, but it is a nice home PC that is designed for multimedia activities and everyday computing tasks.

Its specifications are decent: it includes a 64-bit Pentium D 930 CPU, which has dual-core technology and is perfect for multitasking. Other key specifications include 1GB RAM, a 160GB hard drive and a LightScribe-capable DVD burner. The hard drive does seem to offer less storage than many PCs in this price range.

In our tests, this drive managed to transfer data at a rate of 17MBps, and in World Bench 5 the Pavilion scored 83, which is a little slower than we expected. It encoded 52 minutes' worth of WAV files into 192Kbps MP3 files in 2min 28sec.

We didn't run any gaming bench­marks on this machine. With a GeForce 6200SE graphics card, which features TurboCache (a technology that uses a portion of system RAM for graphics purposes), the machine is not geared towards any serious gaming, as its 3DMark 2005 score of 1031 illustrates.

What we liked about this PC is its relatively small case and design. It's shorter than a typical mid-tower case and it has a concealable set of connectivity options on the front panel along with a memory card reader, which makes it easy to transfer files from portable devices to your PC.

The LightScribe-capable DVD burner allows you to professionally label any discs you create by simply flipping them over and burning onto the label side.