Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're going to take a look at the dell inspiron 123 30 so this is a fixed configuration 1199 all-in-one from Dell it's a 23 inch screen 19 by 10 resolution and as you can see it runs Windows 8 so this is a touchscreen it's got 10-point touch screen works pretty well there's a little bit of drag it's not as good as say an iPad or a higher-end smartphone but it's good enough for probably most of what you'll do on the system the stand is also less adjustable than some other all the ones we've seen it only lets you tilt the screen about 40 degrees back that's convenient if you want to walk up and use it but we've seen other all ones that lay down entirely flat and this system does not do that notice for the rest of the system it's actually similarly bare-bones it has a core i5 CPU eight gigs of RAM a one terabyte hard drive and an embedded graphics chip from Intel so while it's not a gaming PC by any stretch you can certainly do most day-to-day applications with no problem but looking around the rest of the system there aren't that many unique features here it has a standard DVD drive so its core specs are pretty straightforward for PC in this price range and the rest of its features aren't really that exciting either there's some USB 3 ports and an SD card slot here as long as some audio jacks over the top there's a webcam you can see it actually has a nice little dial that lets you adjust the angle that's useful but the one really standout feature set are the ports in the back of the system that give you a nice array of audio and video inputs so you can see there's all kinds of jacks back here there's composite video HDMI IN VGA in VGA out as well as an optical digital audio output as well as a standard digital audio jack now we've seen HDMI in on plenty of other all-in-ones but the VGA and the composite video especially are really rare for systems in this class so that's nice it gives you some flexibility to connect all kinds of devices to the Dell including some older monitors or older pcs so you know this could be sort of a useful home entertainment hub if you want to really turn it into that otherwise the system doesn't really have any of the unique our higher-end features we've seen some on ones there's no blu-ray drive there's no NFC sensor there's no discrete graphics card or super high resolution screen for the most part this is just a straight ahead commodity system and that's fine for its price that's about all you can really expect so if you're interested in a touchscreen all-in-one Windows 8 PC and you really just want to straightforward computer behind it this is a pretty great choice and it's fairly priced so I'm rich Brown this is the Dell Inspiron 123 3