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There’s always more to a standard business desktop computer than meets the eye. Design choices can influence a PC’s usability and reliability, and affect how much it costs to manufacturer and in turn, the asking price. HP’s dc7700 is aimed at the small office or the larger institution installing on a one-per desk basis.

This is a slimline, black PC with a silver front, which can be mounted horizontally or vertically between a pair of supporting feet. It has room for single 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch drives, mounted one above the other and on the review sample, there’s a 16-speed DVD rewriter with LightScribe, but no 16-in-1 memory card reader, which some other models in the range include. There was a copy of MS Office 2007 installed on the review PC, but this is only an option on the spec sheet and isn’t included in the price quoted here.

Below the drives are a couple of USB 2.0 ports and jacks for microphone and line out. Moving to the back, there are legacy serial and parallel sockets, as well as six more USB 2.0 connectors and one for a Gigabyte Ethernet network. With a total of 10 USB sockets, the dc7700 is pretty expandable, for a small business PC.

The graphics adapter is on-board, so none of the available expansion slots – two PCI and one each at single-speed and 16-speed PCI Express – is occupied. There’s therefore a good deal of potential for adding extra cards.

The PC is built around a Core 2 Duo processor, running at 1.80GHz and with 2MB of L2 cache shared between the cores. There’s 1GB of main memory as well, which is ample for Windows XP, but you may find it restrictive if you later switch to Vista and want to run several heavyweight applications. There are four memory slots in the PC though, so you can add memory without having to replace what’s already there.