Review: Viewsonic VOT120 mini PC

Viewsonic's VOT120 crams a full PC into a tiny compact box, smaller even than some external hard disk drives. The system is well suited for those needing a low-cost PC for basic tasks such as web surfing, email, and editing documents, so long as buyers do not expect too much in the way of multimedia performance.

Available now, the VOT120 is basically a "netbook without a screen" according to Viewsonic, as it has the same hardware specifications as the popular category of mini laptop, but fits it all into a box measuring just 13 x 11.5 x 3.9cm in size.

The other notable thing about the VOT120 is the price. At £200, it could almost be an impulse purchase for consumers, although potential buyers should note that it does not come with a keyboard, mouse, or monitor – these must be supplied separately.

Viewsonic also said the VOT120 can be bought for even less - just £155 - without an operating system, for those who want to install Linux or some other platform instead of Windows.

Like a netbook, the VOT120 is based on Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor and has 1GB of memory and a 160GB Sata hard drive, with Windows XP Home edition pre-installed.

This specification means that the system is perfectly capable of running applications such as Microsoft Office and most other tasks, and we found this to be the case, although the single-core Atom processor does not deliver the performance of the dual-core chips found in most PCs today.

What lets the system down is the integrated graphics of the Intel 945GSE, which means that the VOT120 is not suitable for playing graphic-heavy games, although watching web video is perfectly fine.

The VOT120 could probably serve as a basic PC for small businesses, although potential buyers should note that it comes with Windows XP Home edition, which lacks some features of the full XP Professional, such as the ability to log on to an Active Directory domain.

Power is supplied by a separate mains adapter, similar to those that come with laptops and Viewsonic quotes the power consumption as just 13W when operating and 0.98W in sleep mode.

Because of its small size, the VOT120 appears peppered with I/O ports. As well as the power switch, the front features two USB ports, microphone and headphone jack sockets and an external SATA (eSATA) port. The latter is for adding an external hard drive and allows for higher data transfer speeds than USB, at least until USB version 3.0 becomes widespread.