This machine is an odd mix of good and not quite so good. It starts well, with a midi tower case which has plenty of room for expansion and contains a Pentium III 550, which gives it a good turn of speed. There's 64MB of memory, which is adequate for Windows 98, and the 9.5GB hard drive and 52-speed CDROM drive (take that speed with a pinch of salt) complement each other well.

Sound comes from a chip on the system board and runs to a mediocre pair of Taiwanese speakers, but there's a separate 56Kbps modem card and, more importantly, a separate video adapter. The curse of lower-cost PCs is integrated graphics, which are nearly always outdated and often can't be upgraded. If you are forced to buy a PC with integrated graphics, make sure it has an AGP slot so you can plug in a separate adapter later on.

The S3 Savage 4-based graphics card gives reasonable results, though the 15-inch Smile monitor supplied with the machine does it few favours. It's best to restrict the display on this to a resolution of no more than 800 by 600 pixels.

With an above-average keyboard and mouse and a good software bundle, the Explorer 550 is a good machine for the money.