Dell Inspiron One 19 all-in-one desktop PC

A reasonably priced all-in-one PC

PC World Australia (online)

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If you're looking for a home PC that won't create clutter, Dell's Inspiron One 19 is a cheap all-in-one PC with decent performance. However, we wish it was equipped with better Wi-Fi.

Pros

  • Inexpensive, reasonable performance, simple to setup and use

Cons

  • Poor speakers, no Bluetooth or 802.11n wireless

Bottom Line

The Dell Inspiron One 19 all-in-one PC has a discreet design that will sit unnoticed in the living room until it needs to be used. It's cheap and reasonably powered, but isn't recommended for watching movies or listening to music.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 999.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

The Dell Inspiron One 19 desktop PC isn't the prettiest of all-in-one computer we've seen, but it has a discreet design. Unfortunately, Dell's claim of a one-cord setup is untrue, as it comes standard with a wired keyboard and mouse combo; a wireless setup costs extra.

Though the name implies a 19in screen, the Inspiron One 19's display actually measures 18.5 inches diagonally. It has a native resolution of 1366x768 pixels and a 16:10 aspect ratio, which means you'll be able to place two windows next to each other. It can display 720p content, though the small screen is hardly the best for watching high-definition media.

The Dell Inspiron One 19 has integrated stereo speakers situated at the back. Producing a total two Watts of power, they sound tinny and have a low maximum volume. You'll want to pick up a set of dedicated speakers for listening to music or watching movies.

There are plenty of ports available on the side and back of the PC; you get five USB 2.0 ports, 4-pin FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, headphone/microphone jacks and a multi-card reader supporting SD, MemoryStick and xD formats. We aren't sure why Dell chose to include PS/2 ports or a parallel printer connection on the rear of the Inspiron One 19, given that they are obsolete and take up room that could have been used for more USB ports or a Bluetooth module.

The integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi is suitable for small homes, though we would have preferred the newer 802.11n standard, which would let you place the PC farther from a wireless router.

Dell offers the Inspiron One 19 all-in-one desktop PC in two hardware configurations, with a choice of either an Intel Core 2 Duo E5300 processor (clocked at 2.6GHz) and 2GB of DDR2 memory, or $200 more for an E7500 CPU with 4GB of memory. We tested the cheaper configuration, which produced reasonable performance given the price tag.

The PC also comes with Intel GMA x4500 integrated graphics and a 500GB hard drive — enough space for your photos and music with some videos. The drive offers 451GB of usable space, with a recovery partition taking up the remainder.

Dell ships a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium with the PC, which will let you take full advantage of the full 4GB of memory; a 32-bit version would only use a maximum of 3.2GB RAM.

Performance Benchmarks
Model Price WorldBench 6 3DMark06 iTunes Encoding
(minutes)		 Blender 3D
rendering
Dell Inspiron One 19 $999 N/A 821 1m 8s 1m 9s
Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z $999 N/A 828 1m 6s 1m 9s
ASUS Eee Top ET2002 $999 36 N/A 6m 40s 3m 42s
HP Pavilion All-In-One MS212a $1199 58 N/A 3m 5s 2m 27s
Medion akoya P4010 $1299 87 1316 1m 21s 1m 23s
Apple iMac $1599 N/A N/A 37.1s N/A
Dell Studio One 19 $1888 100 1524 57s 1m

Our synthetic WorldBench 6 benchmark suite failed to deliver an overall score, but the Inspiron One 19 performed capably in each individual test. It was marginally slower than the similarly specced Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z in the majority of our tests, though was a better performer when running office applications and when multitasking between a Web browser and encoding media. These results, combined with our Blender, iTunes encoding and 3DMark06 tests, show that Dell's entry-level all-in-one is suitable for most uses around the home, though its poor graphics adapter makes it unsuitable for games.

Dell Inspiron One 19

The Dell Dock software would suit touch-screen PCs, but is useless on the Inspiron One 19.

The Dell Inspiron One 19 isn't as cluttered with software as HP's all-in-one PCs; you get CD burning software, along with McAfee anti-virus and a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007. There's a Wi-Fi configuration application that thankfully doesn't get in the way of Windows' own utility. We were confused by the inclusion of Dell Dock, however. It's similar to the dock launcher found in Mac OS X. If the computer had a touch screen, we wouldn't mind, but on the Inspiron One 19 it is a less useful alternative to Windows 7's taskbar.

The Inspiron One 19 is reasonably powerful and reasonably priced, making it a good choice for students who need something basic to do their homework on.

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