The Optiplex line of corporate PCs has always had one of the best desktop cases around, and the GX150SD takes this one step forward with a new clamshell-style design. The new black case flips open with the release of latches on either side, and stays attached to the chassis. Another plus point is that all the major components - hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM, expansion plates and the power supply - are tool-free (you don't need a screwdriver to remove them).

The review system came with a 933MHz Pentium III processor backed up by 128MB of SDRAM, which can be extended to 512MB through the two DIMM slots. The display is powered by a 16MB Nvidia TNT2 Pro 4x AGP adapter; not blisteringly fast nor state of the art, but above average for this sector of the market. Output from this drives a 17-inch Dell e770p monitor with a 16.0-inch viewable diagonal and a nice, stable image.

There are no free drive bays, but in reality in a corporate machine this isn't much of an issue. The system we reviewed came with a 40GB Western Digital hard drive, a 16-speed slimline 'notebook style' DVD-ROM drive and a floppy disk drive. Some users may prefer a CD-RW drive in place of the DVD drive, but other than that, there's little need for extra drives.

The motherboard, using Intel's 815 chipset, provides two PCI slots (both free), two PS/2 ports, two serial ports, one parallel port, three audio ports and an RJ45 Ethernet port. In addition, there are four USB ports, two on the rear of the chassis, and two in the front fascia, along with a second headphone socket. The review system came with Windows 2000 preinstalled (Windows 98 or NT are options) and Dell's OpenManage Client was the only installed software.

You can get a more powerful, or more expandable, PC than the Optiplex GX150SD, but its small footprint desktop size and tool-free components make it a tough system for IT managers to ignore.