HP Compaq dc7800 Integrated Work Center Review

Of course the whole "zero footprint" thing is an exaggeration. True, the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Desktop doesn't touch your desktop when it's riding piggyback on the company's L1906i 19-inch LCD monitor. But the monitor takes some desk space, as do the keyboard and mouse -- although when the system's idle, you can stash the keyboard beneath the monitor to reclaim 30 square inches or so.

Nevertheless, the configuration HP calls an Integrated Work Center (IWC) is about as compact as an office PC can get, a classy way to reclaim elbow room in a crowded cubicle or to keep a bulky box from dominating a small-office desk. About the only negative is that any comparisons to Apple's elegant, one-piece iMac are spoiled by the spaghetti of six cables spilling out of the rear (PC power, display power, display VGA connector, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and presumably your office Ethernet). A snap-on plastic cover collects a few of the cords, but a wireless keyboard and mouse would be helpful.

And anyway, a better Apple allusion would be to the Mac Mini -- the Ultra-Slim Desktop tops even impressively preshunk PCs like the Lenovo ThinkCentre A61e in squeezing a full-fledged system into a 7-pound, dinner-plate-sized package at 2.6 by 9.9 by 10 inches. That's why affixing it to the back of a flat-panel monitor is a no-brainer.

(Especially in our case: The first time we spun the four Philips screws that attach the monitor mounting bracket to the Compaq's top, we turned out to be 90 degrees off, with the DVD±RW drive opening downward instead of sideways.)

Sorry, No Quad

Not every IT manager will pick the petite design seen here. The dc7800 is also available in more traditional minitower and small-form-factor cases. Those styles offer PCI, PCI Express x1, and PCIe x16 expansion slots -- full-height with the minitower, low-profile slots with the small desktop -- and four DIMM memory sockets. They can also be ordered with Core 2 Quad processors.

By contrast, the Ultra-Slim has no expansion slots -- the Intel Q35 chipset's integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 is the first, last, and only video option -- and two notebook-style SODIMM sockets for a maximum 4GB of DDR-2/667 or /800 memory, along with a 135-watt, laptop-style external AC adapter.

No quad-core CPU is offered; the fastest on the menu is the 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo E6850. Our test unit had the next-best model E6750, a 2.66GHz dual-core with the same 1333MHz front-side bus and 4MB of Level 2 cache. It gave first-class performance, but struck us as overkill for a PC probably destined for nothing more strenuous than Word and Excel -- especially considering its price tag.

When we visited HP's Web store to configure a dc7800 matching our test unit -- with the Core 2 Duo E6750; 1GB of DDR-2/667 memory; an 80GB, 7,200-rpm Seagate hard disk and HL-DT-ST double-layer DVD±RW drive; and a 1GB flash memory module for Windows Vista Business's trivially-performance-enhancing ReadyBoost -- it came to a hefty $1,192.

Add $348 for the L1906i monitor with the Integrated Work Center stand, and you've spent over $1,500 for an office productivity system. We were much happier to see a discount deal on a preconfigured Ultra-Slim good through January 31, 2008: It offers the same specs as our system with a perfectly adequate Core 2 Duo E4500 (2.2GHz with 2MB of L2 cache) for $829, bringing the package price down to $1,177.

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