Mesh Home PC CS Windows 10 Pro PC that doesn’t cost the earth
A reasonably priced PC with Pro
It may have arrived as a free upgrade, but Windows 10 is still very much a profitmaking product. And Microsoft’s most profitable version is Windows Pro. It costs £100 more than the standard Home edition, selling at £220 – more expensive than some PCS. That’s why most of us don’t have it, and miss out on some of Windows 10’s best features.
With Pro’s Remote Desktop, you can fully control your PC from anywhere (give or take a bit of fiddling with the settings). With Bitlocker you can encrypt any file or drive so it can only be read with a password. Perhaps best of all, Windows Update for Business is exactly like Windows Update, except it runs when you choose, rather than at the most annoyingly random times imaginable.
But still – it’s a hundred quid more. Unless, that is, you buy this new desktop PC from Mesh. It comes with Windows 10 Pro installed, and it’s still only £499 for a system that has a quad-core i5-7500 processor, arguably the best-value chip in Intel’s current range. Accompanied by 8GB of memory, this will cheerfully plough through everyday tasks and even more ambitious jobs like Full HD video editing. In our tests, it not only performed well in office and creative software, but it coped exceptionally well with multitasking.
You’d think there wouldn’t be much room left in Mesh’s budget for anything else, and a peek inside the bog-standard black mini-tower case would seem to confirm that. There’s a compact motherboard, a tangle of wires and lotss of empty space. Look closer, though, and at the bottom you’ll see a large heatsink strapped to a small Nvidia Geforce GT 710 graphics card. This is no GTX 1080 (it doesn’t perform any better than the surprisingly decent HD Graphics 630 chip already integrated into the i5 processor), but it means programs that can use it will use it, leaving the main processor to get on with something else.e. You also get some extra monitor outputut options. Thanks to that heatsink, no extraxtra fan is required, so you won’t be botheredred by noise when it kicks into action.
And we’re still not done. While the usual 1TB hard drive is provided for your files, Windows 10 Pro comes on a 120GB Kingston SSD, making booting up and loading programs extremely fast. Don’t get too excited, though.with only half the space of the now more common 240GB drives, you’ll have to be selective about what you keep on it. Although the SSD achieved the claimed 400-odd megabytes per second (MB/S) when reading (opening) data, it couldn’t manage more than 132MB/S when writing (saving), even in our easiest test. But that’s still faster than a traditional hard drive, and your startup drive will mainly be reading anyway.
There’s no M.2 connector for ultra-fast SSDS, nor any external ports faster than USB 3.0, but that’s unlikely to be an issue for most users. Both of the ports on the front of the case are USB 2.0, which is slightly annoying if you tend to use USB 3.0 sticks. Inside, two PCIE x1 slots are available for extras such as a Wi-fi card, but you’d have to replace the 710 to upgrade the graphics and there’s only one free memory socket. There are two 5.25in disc-drive bays, and three 3.5in bays, in addition to the fitted 3.5in and 2.5in drives. There are only two spare SATA connectors, but two of the 3.5in bays, as well as the 5.25ins, can be accessed from the front, so you could add a multi memory card reader.
Gives you quick and quiet performance on Windows 10 Pro
VERDICT: This could be the ideal laptop if you don’t mind floppy keyboards, but only if your needs are simple and your budget large ALTERNATIVE: HP Spectre x2 £1,499 With a keyboard and stylus included, an i7-7560u processor, 8GB of memory and 512GB of storage – you do the maths