Product Reviews

The Dotlink Power Tower 350 SLX didn't get off to a good start. We had trouble getting it to recognise its mouse. The metalwork of the case didn't quite line up with the sockets behind, so the silly little PS/2 sockets couldn't mate properly. Result? No rodentry. We gave up after trying three PS/2 mice and plugged in a sturdy old serial mouse instead. It may clog the back of the PC, but it works, and you can fix it without using an electron microscope.

That hurdle overcome, the Dotlink gave us Windows with many of the trimmings. A black background bore the red and blue Dotlink logo along with the Channel Bar (which simply carries shortcuts to worthy Internet services like the BBC and Vogue magazine). Eight assorted icons included those normally installed by Windows, as well as a shortcut to the Yamaha sound compressor (why?), while the Office 97 toolbar took up position on the right. A nice touch is that the Recycle Bin has been placed at bottom right of the display, which is where the original Macintosh, circa 1984, first put it. Somehow, it still seems the right place.

The screen's resolution was set at 1024x768, which is a bit much for most 15in displays, including this Hansol, though it comes closer than many. It's crisp and fairly legible at this setting, but icons and menu text are just too small for comfort. On the other hand, the display had been sized perfectly to fill the lit screen and set to refresh at 85Hz. Good.

Less good is the fact that the Dotlink thought it had a US keyboard, despite everything else being set for the UK. We got this PC in a bit of a rush, so we'll take it as only an error. All relevant software had been installed, including a reasonable set for the Yamaha sound card and all the bits of Microsoft's mammoth Office '97.

As we've already pointed out, the Hansol monitor has a good image quality. However, when compared to the competition, it's the quantity that lets it down. Nearly all the other PII 350 machines we've seen for £799 include a 17in screen, so why can't the Dotlink?

The 4Mb Diamond Viper 330 graphics card was worse. We used one for most of last year in a Labs PC and, though it worked well enough, it was less helpful than we would like. The nVidia RIVA 128 was an excellent chip in its time, but competitors are now supplying far superior goods.

The Dotlink's sound card was unusual, mainly because it wasn't made by Creative! It's a Yamaha WaveForce 192XG, and, funnily enough, there are a few other unusual things with this card. Chief among them is an audio compression program, which squeezes files by up to 20 times for the Internet, so you can move them around more quickly. It also has 100 assorted classical pieces in a MIDI-like format, a wave editor and the usual imitation stereo stack for playback and volume adjustment. It's interesting, though not comforting, to note that the online documentation says

Documentation can be a very important but often very lacking part of a PC. No surprises, then, that Dotlink offer no beginners guide for the PC novice. So if you don't know your .exe from your .txt, good luck! Dotlink do offer some recompense, by remembering to pack all the relevent manuals and drivers for the various components. Without these you can be seriously stuffed. We have said that a Pentium II 350 is ripe for a future processor upgrade to a PII 450 or even one of the forthcoming Pentium III chips. However, such installations often need switches on the motherboard to be adjusted, and with no motherboard manual you will know neither whether nor which.

Once you have your new PC, what do you do with it? You run software. You'll have a head start if software is supplied with the machine, better yet if it's already installed and ready to run.

We were surprised to see Microsoft Office supplied with the Dotlink. Although the company can get better discounts than you or I, Office costs a bomb, and it shows in the hardware Dotlink supplies with it - is this their excuse for the lack of a 17in screen. This is all fine if you are intending to buy Office anyway, silly if you're not.

None of this PC magic would be possible without the circuitry and storage inside the system case. In there, you find the motherboard. This carries the processor, memory, ports, expansion cards and just about everything else, except the drives and power supply (which attach to it via cables). The strength of a motherboard is governed mainly by its chipset, and the only chipset (so far) that can cope with a 100MHz bus and Pentium II processors is Intel's BX. Needless to say, that's what this machines has. Plugging into this board is the afore-mentioned Pentium II 350 chip, Yamaha sound card and Diamond graphics card, along with a 64Mb DIMM memory chip and an ISA 56K modem. On the end of a few cables can be found the various drives - floppy and CD-ROM are the standard fare. However, the hard disk - by far the most important drive in a PC - is a rather meagre 4.6Gb in size, which must count against it.

Our speed tests showed that the Dotlink was a decent enough performer, coming in middle rank in our PII 350 group test. It's main failing was in Word, but it picked up its heels in Excel and took second equal in both Approach and CorelDRAW! Its disk is a tad small, and its graphics card a tad old, but neither of these issues caused major problems in terms of overall performance. However, the graphics card also has less memory on it than anyone else's - 4Mb is easily enough for most Windows workings, but rules out high-res gaming.

The Dotlink's 4.6Gb hard disk is a lot smaller than we expect to see these days, though it's reasonably fast. And that defines the PC as a whole, really. It has an excellent monitor, well adjusted, but it's only a 15-incher. The big plus of the Dotlink is the software: Microsoft Office, particularly as it's the Pro edition including Access, the hefty industry-leading database. This is probably the most comprehensive software of its type, and that may make up for the hardware shortfall. Or it may not.