Product Reviews

The Brother LW-750ic looks like a blast from the past, reminding me of my Amstrad PCW - the first 'serious' bit of technology I ever bought. Plenty of people still use their PCWs today - they might not exactly be state-of- the-art, but they were cheap and it fulfilled many people's needs.

The Brother isn't a true IBM-compatible PC but does offer the sort of capability that many home and small office users need from a computer. Like the original PCW, it includes a monitor, keyboard and integrated printer. However, Brother has brought things up to date by including a 14in VGA colour monitor and a mono and colour-capable inkjet. This latter is integrated with the keyboard unit, so the whole package looks much like a modern electronic typewriter attached to a monitor.

What you get is a system without the flexibility of a true PC, but with the benefit of low price and simplicity. There's no multimedia capability, or built-in hard disk. The mouse-driven, icon-based GEOS operating system is held on a ROM chip, and there's just 1Mb of RAM to keep everything turning over, allied to what feels quite a slow processor.

You can't run PC software, but one PC-compatible element is an MS-DOS format 1.44Mb floppy disk drive. This offers the only data storage option, and it's not the drawback that it sounds, because without Windows' complex formatting, TrueType fonts and graphics, data files are quite small. There's a reasonable range of file format filters supplied

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on floppy disk, so, for example, the word processor can read files from most PC word processing applications, and vice versa.

Unlike the original Amstrad PCW, the Brother comes with a variety of useful software. This includes a word processor, contacts database, drawing program, spreadsheet, agenda and file manager. None of the software is especially powerful, but the key applications - word processor and spreadsheet - are pretty capable and should be more than sufficient for the less demanding buyer.

The word processor includes a spellchecker and thesaurus together with support for paragraph styles, search and replace and even mailmerges (form letters). For Luddites, a separate application lets you use the Brother like a typewriter, where each line is printed as soon as you hit the Return key.

The integrated printer is basic by modern standards, based on an inkjet engine limited to 300x300dpi. However, you can swap out the black cartridge and replace it with a three-colour unit. The word processor application can also handle coloured text and graphics pasted from the system clipboard, which means putting together party invites and so on is straightforward. The integral printer can only handle one piece of paper at a time (a 30-sheet feeder is an extra-cost option), but for low-volume work this isn't a problem.

Expansion potential is unsurprisingly limited, but there are a few options. You can connect a US Robotics Sportster 14.4 fax modem and send faxes from any application (although you can't receive faxes on the Brother), and it's possible to connect an optional handheld SC-700 400dpi greyscale scanner.

There's no doubt that this system is pretty neat, but given that you can get a basic Pentium 75 system for less than £600 (£705) these days, the price - even if you find it at a discount - seems high. While the Brother offers simplicity and enough capability for many purposes, most people will find it worth putting up with a steeper learning curve for the greater power and flexibility that a real PC offers.