Touch-technology at an affordable price
The AE2020 from MSI is an all-in-one computer – instead of having separate units for the screen and processing section, everything is built into one unit.
In this case it's roughly the size of a 20in screen, which is what this computer has, but it's deeper at the back to allow for the processing unit and the stand, as well as a transparent area around the bezel.
It was easy to set up with Windows configuring itself and only the mains power cable to plug in. MSI has supplied a so-so keyboard and a mouse, but it would be possible to control the computer without using either, as it has a touch-sensitive screen – dragging a finger across the screen moves the mouse pointer, and tapping equates to a mouse-click.
Once Windows had loaded we were presented with the option to install a 60-day trial of the Norton security software, with the stern warning that not doing so would leave the computer 'unprotected'. That's true, but it did feel a bit like scaremongering given that there are plenty of free anti-virus programs available, Windows includes its own firewall which offers some protection, and the Norton product will expire after 60 days anyway unless users enter their credit card details. We were then given a menu listing more software to install, with the instruction to tick the ones we wanted – the boxes were already ticked, though, and we couldn't change it. Still, the software was fairly innocuous (it included Microsoft Works for office tasks and the free Adobe Reader software for viewing PDF files).
The touchscreen worked well, although we were glad to have the mouse for more fiddly tasks such as when editing a photo. There's an on-screen keyboard available, which you tap to select letters, but typing with the keyboard, although it wasn't a particularly good model, was still more comfortable.
An Intel Pentium Dual Core T4300 processor lies at the heart of the computer – it's a relatively low-end model by today's standards but together with the computer's 3GB of memory, it's more than capable of dealing with office and internet tasks as well as watching DVDs (there's a DVD drive on one side) and editing photos. It uses the Nvidia Ion graphics chipset, which means it’s perfectly happy to play high-definition video at even the highest resolution.
