Product Reviews

The West One looks very straight, and lightly styled. There's room for four large and three small drives, which should suffice. The processor is a 350MHz AMD K6-2, paired with 128Mb of PC100 RAM in a MicroStar motherboard. With three ISA and four PCI slots as well as the AGP slot, there's plenty of expansion room. What's less clear with the AMD-based systems is if you can upgrade the processor, and by how much. There's a 400MHz K6 in the pipeline, and rumours of a 500MHz version, but the same rumours also suggest that a new motherboard might be necessary.

It's vital that a Christmas PC runs straight out of the box, and whether it does or not is down to its software setup. It's not easy for these vendors to get it right. The setup is more complex than that for a standard PC: each of the extras bundled (like the printer) needs a piece of software called a 'driver' to be installed for it to work. There are also plenty of ways in which the main Windows installation can be messed up. A garish colour scheme will make a PC unpleasant to use, too many icons on the desktop will make it confusing, poor setup of the screen driver may waste the potential of the monitor or graphics card, and so on. Ideally, we'd like PCs to arrive with sensible bread-and-butter configurations - nothing fancy, just a decent setup.

The West One made a disappointing start. All we got when we booted Windows was a screenful of dirty-blue blocks. Ho-hum. So we rebooted the machine and got it running under Safe mode, selected a basic VGA screen driver, rebooted again, installed the supplied drivers for the PC's Matrox G200 card, rebooted yet again and finally it was happy.

It had been designed for self-setup, in which you're asked to supply your name and the Windows registration number. The above problems had messed this process right up, so we eventually arrived at Windows 98 running at 640x480 in a mere 16 colours. On the way, the PC had acquired configurations for both US and UK keyboards. The refresh rate needed sorting and the monitor hadn't been adjusted either.

It didn't take us too long to get the PC shipshape, but can you see a new user getting through all these problems unaided? They'd wish they'd invested in a Nintendo after all.

The hard disk is an impressive 9.4Gb IBM job, which offers great performance, and will take quite a lot of effort to fill up. LG CD-ROM drive, on the other hand, isn't so impressive. Upon pressing the eject button, it delayed quite a while before anything happened, so you press the button a second and third time, following which the drive tray slides sweetly out - then straight back in again. CDs are an enormous convenience, but why are their external controls

ADVERTISEMENT

so often ill-matched to human beings?

West One's graphics card of choice was an excellent and cost-conscious 8Mb Matrox Millennium G200, which offers superior Windows work and pretty impressive game graphics too. The screen was a good 15-incher: the Iiyama Vision Master 350.

In January, Creative Labs, maker of the ubiquitous Sound Blaster audio cards, bought Ensoniq. The most immediate fruit of this acquisition was the AudioPCI 64 sound card, which combines Ensoniq technology with Creative's industry-leading software, which includes a Wave file editor, as well as the usual CD and Midi file players. This card came the West One, along with a nice little pair of Yamahas speakers, rateds at 5W each. They don't look much, but they make a decent din.

A modem is no longer an option in a standalone PC - it's an essential. Without it, you have no e-mail, no faxing, no Internet, no voice mail. Nowadays, these are vital applications. Almost all modems these days are capable of the same speed: 56K per second. Not all ISPs are geared up for 56K access yet - but they're getting there. And anything that makes web crawling faster is welcome. West One didn't let itself down, fitting none other than our Top 50 model, the Diamond SupraExpress 56, in its internal PCI form.

The Epson Stylus Color 640 is a close relation to the more common 440, the drivers being almost indistinguishable, except that the 640 offers higher-resolution printing. This means better quality, but despite the numbers, the 640's prints are closer to those of the 440 than the 740, Epson's really desirable inkjet. The main asset of the 640 is that it's quicker than the 440. And you get one with the West One.

Software provision wasn't a very seasonal affair. West One pushed out only a studious Lotus SmartSuite. No fun here at all, unless you're a total workaholic.

If you know nothing about PCs, you need a general guide to tell you how to set things up and get going. If you know lots about PCs, you need component manuals to fix or fiddle with them. Each is essential to getting long-term value from your investment, but few makers come up with both.

Apart from a two-sheet Quickstart guide, West One sticks strictly to the manuals supplied with the components. All the essential drivers were in the box, though, so we shouldn't complain.

The Pro Series Advantage's AMD processor really is a top performer, beating PII 350 machines in our speed tests. It turned in 1513 for Word, 1489 for Excel, 939 in Approach and 1543 in CorelDRAW, giving an overall result of 1371. The hard disk and graphics card clearly do nothing to slow the machine down either.

The West One has excellent performance and a handy 128Mb of memory. As supplied, it didn't work, but we'd be surprised if they let any more out the door in that condition. Is there anything else to the West One, though? Its Epson 640 printer is a cut above the 440 supplied elsewhere, but the bundled software, SmartSuite alone, is not likely to light up your fir tree. And how much further can you go with the existing AMD processor line? The West One is worth considering as a fast box, but your first real upgrade is likely to be a motherboard replacement. Performance freaks should maybe take a look, but keep both eyes open.