Product Reviews

At present there are two price points that we feel present very good deals for the cost-conscious PC buyer. £700 plus VAT will get you a 400Mhz Celeron with 128Mb RAM, a 17in screen and a general level of quality that means no corners have been cut. Spending £300 more will get you a machine like the one reviewed here - an almost top-of-the-range Pentium III processor with similar quality peripherals plus a nice collection of extra bits and pieces.

At the moment the difference in performance between Celerons and Pentium III's isn't that great. However, PIII's have extra sets of commands that will speed up jobs like video editing and voice recognition - all the processor-intensive stuff. When new software takes advantage of these commands, the PIII chip will come of age, with an estimated 40% boost in performance.

Turning on the Time presented us with Windows and a mouse tutorial, followed by a demand for your name and the registration number for your copy of Windows. Once you're past that, you have to make a recovery disk. Have to. It throws a sulk if you don't. Quite right, really, but it's a bit tedious. Once you're past all that, you get a green Windows desktop with Time's company logo plastered all over, and the Windows Welcome panel on top of that. One icon on the desktop offers to help make the Recovery disk again, another to run an application called TutorPro to tell you why. The serious office applications were installed, the games weren't - probably very sensible.

How many things do you stare at for hours on end? There's television, but at least you're a safe distance from that. Not so a PC's monitor, which sits a mere arm's length away, placing great demands on your eyes. So it follows that you should get the best monitor your budget can manage.

Prices have dropped considerably in the last couple of years, so most of the PCs these days come with 17in monitors. Quality has also improved, as most monitors now comfortably exceed health and safety specs.

Driving the monitor is the PC's graphics controller, generally installed as an expansion card in the motherboard's AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) slot. The advent of so-called '3D textures' in action games has meant these controllers often feature massive amounts of memory - 16Mb is now common. Even if you never play games, the spin-off is that they'll now allow massive resolutions, with colours as true as the monitor can make them. You'd need a 21in screen, maybe bigger, to exploit all that.

The Time's monitor is a 17in CTX, model 1769E. It's a good screen, not a great one - about what you should expect at this price. Like other CTX displays, it's easily adjusted with eight buttons and an

Time supplied a horrid pair of speakers. Shame, because its sound card is one of the best, a Sound Blaster Live! Value, reviewed in our June 99 issue. It has both front and rear stereo outputs, capable of great surround sound for games.

Computers may be the most complex machines ever made, but it's not often you get a user guide. There are several reasons for this, the main one being cost. Every supplier can afford to write one, but few can afford to write one every few weeks. That's how fast PCs change. However, you almost always get the individual component manuals. The essential one is for the motherboard. If you decide to upgrade, it'll tell you what's possible and how to do it. Less essential are those for the video controller, CD or DVD drive, sound card and modem. Time writes its own manuals. They get round creeping obsolescence by putting each part in a separate section of a big green folder. Excellent.

You have to concentrate when buying PCs. You're buying hardware, not software. Unless the bundled software is exactly what you were planning to buy anyway, you shouldn't let it influence your decision. Time certainly do lay it on thick, though. As well as Lotus SmartSuite, the quality office software suite, you get a handful of GSP applications to draw, publish, book-keep and teach typing, not to mention half a dozen mainstream games like Tomb Raider II and Red Alert.

Of course, a 56K modem is included. No modem means no e-mail, no fax, no Internet - so these days, it's an essential. Another common feature we see these days is a DVD drive. DVD brings you films. And enormous games. And Digital audio. And anything else that needs more than a gigabyte to store. So it's no bad thing that one is included here. Other extra gadgets include a quality Saitek joystick. There's also a joypad, though its layout won't suit those more familiar with the Playstation. There's a mono headset for telephony, and even a training video!

Inside the case, the Time is based around a full-sized motherboard, the trustworthy SuperMicro P6SBA, which offers three ISA slots and four PCI as well as the AGP. Cable runs are neat, despite being held with only one re-usable clip. There's plenty of room for more drives in both (3.5in and 5.25in) sizes.

It didn't surprise us that this PC raced through our performance tests, scoring a record 1721. Part of its speed comes from the brute power of its 500MHz Pentium III, of course. It's ably supported, though, by a 7,200rpm IBM hard disk and a Voodoo 3 3000 graphics card.

This computer get almost everything spot on! It has a powerful PIII 500, 128Mb of memory, a full-size case and motherboard, Voodoo 3 3000, DVD drive, and a thumping great (and fast) 13.4Gb hard disk. The sound card is the excellent Sound Blaster Live! Value. The speakers are dismal, but you can't have everything - and they're probably the cheapest and easiest parts to replace. The monitor isn't the best 17in around, but it's perfectly acceptable. And it's all topped off with a bundle of extras. Despite its increasing size, this company is making much better PCs than it used to. Pick up your own personal Time machine.