The base price of a desktop PC has to include around £70 for a copy of Windows, making it hard to buy at much below £350. Well, that's the received wisdom, but in practice there's another choice, one the government of Venezuela has recently made in vowing to switch all administrative departments to Linux, the alternative, open-source operating system. The Omega LX2400 from Tiny also runs Linux, in a variety called Linspire which does its best to welcome anybody used to Windows.

Despite the low price, the Omega LX2400 is a conventional enough PC. OK, it has a 17-inch CRT monitor, rather than a flat panel, but the Samtron 78E is a serviceable budget screen, if a bit round-faced. The PC itself is based on a 2.4GHz Celeron with 128MB of memory, an 80GB Western Digital hard drive and a DVD/CD-RW combo.

128MB may seem a bit meagre in Windows XP memory-hungry terms, but Linux is a lot more frugal with what it needs. Even so, we'd prefer to see 256MB installed, to cope better with decent-sized applications such as OpenOffice.

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It would have been good to see an integrated suite, such as OpenOffice, supplied with the Linux installation on this Tiny system. Linspire offers access to its CNR site, an online shop, but most of the 300-plus Linux-based applications and utilities available there cost money. It may not be a lot, £20 or £30 a shot, but it mounts up. Go instead to www.openoffice.org and you can download OpenOffice for free. Other well-known Linux applications, such as The GIMP graphics editor, are also free: a quick search will find them.

The performance of the Omega 2400LX is a bit snappier than a typical Windows XP platform with a similar specification. It's not, however, the blisteringly fast alternative that Linux fans would have you believe. Linspire presents a desktop looking similar to Windows and most of the facilities you'd expect to find in a Microsoft operating system are available here, though sometimes implemented in different ways.

A Web browser and an e-mail client are included in the Linspire package, so you have the basics of a useful PC, and there's even a couple of games provided. The Omega LX2400 is a good, inexpensive alternative to a budget Windows PC. However, it's probably better suited to a Linux enthusiast or a system manager kitting out a small office user than to a first-time PC buyer.

It's good to see a computer company offering a PC which doesn't rely on Windows. The increasing, large-scale use of open-source software in various parts of the world proves it's a viable alternative. When you can get a full-function PC for under £300 by using it, it's even more tempting.