Went into PC world today as a guy at work needed a new HDD, and while he was paying for it I noticed a display in the entrance with a big screen so went to have a look. They had a "MEDIA CENTRE DISPLAY" going on, with a 27" widescreen LCD tv/monitor (had built in side speakers) and what I thought was a VCR sized DVD player. Turns out to be a media PC made by a company called AVENT. Very sexy looking black gloss case, and it was horizontal, rather than vertical like normal towers, and literally was the same size as a VCR, or hifi amp, etc...

Had a 250gb HDD, 1gb RAM, P4 3.0gHz processor, DVD-RW drive, on board sound (think it was 5.1) and wifi connection. Waht was nice about it was all you could see on the front was the DVD loading drive (to the left) centre display (much like a DVD player display) and then underneath those were three pop down covers - left had AV socket input, S/PDIF audio in, and a couple other connections, centre had a multi card reader and something to do with a TV RF connection (looked like a button tho) and can't remember what was on the right one. The centre one also had normal DVD player buttons - play/pause, stop, forward, back, skip/search etc. Came with a nice volume remote, a channel/dvd remote, and a wireless keyboard + mouse... All in all it seemed a real nice unit..

Price was amazing tho - the screen was only £399, and the Advent PC thingy was only £300!

The only thing that'd put me off it tho is a) no second CD/DVD drive (so no copying CD's) and b) don't think it had twin tuners (had a built in digital TV card, but think it only had one, so you could only record the digital channel you are watching - can't record one and watch another, or record two at the same time. Not sure if it has "pause live TV" but you can record TV onto the HDD, so you probably can....

Anyone know anything about these? Seemed pretty good to me, had a little play with it (for some reason tho it wasn't connected to a TV aerial ) and the sound and picture was great! Looked really really nice aswell, which is soooooo much better than the normal PC tower's you get.

Can't find any info on it on the web, or even on PC worlds site.... Anyone shed more light?