Product Reviews

IBM has attracted praise in the past for the design of its NetVista PCs, especially for the dark blue housing. Unfortunately for the M41, IBM appears to have stepped back in time to the middle of the 1980s for its beige desktop inspiration.

Designed for an office scenario, the M41's specifications reflect a no consumer frills policy - indeed, the 16Mb TNT2 Vanta graphics card would have been out of date 18 months ago. Meanwhile, the rear-mounted audio ports will make it difficult for anyone nervous about moving the PC to plug headphones in.

However, one thing about the M41's specifications that doesn't quite match up to the office workhorse ideal is the processor. A 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor provides a lot more processing power than is needed to run standard office software, and allied to this power is the heat produced, which in an office can get very intense. Also, despite its potential power, the overall benchmark score of 3.45 is substantially behind the 3.96 from HP's almost identically priced Vectra VL420 (see Reviews, issue 88, p139).

In one of three SDRAM sockets sits 256Mb of RAM, which is plenty for running multiple office applications. It's only PC133 memory, but it's more than adequate as outright performance isn't a priority.

IBM has supplied its own 41Gb Deskstar 60GXP hard disk for permanent storage. Once formatted, this gives you 36.4Gb for applications and data. Again, this is overkill for a corporate desktop likely to spend its life connected to a high-capacity network with a backup system in place. Allowing software to be installed on office systems is generally frowned upon, but the 48-speed Samsung CD-ROM will make any authorised installs much quicker than installing over a 100Mbits/sec

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network connection.

The network adaptor is actually built into the motherboard, thanks to an Intel PRO/100 chip. This keeps all of the PCI slots free and also means you don't have to open up the PC to install a separate card. There are also four USB ports: two at the rear next to the PS/2 ports and two on the front. This makes life easier for connecting portable devices such as a digital camera to the front, while printers or scanners can use the rear sockets. There's also the usual complement of two serial ports and a parallel port for legacy peripherals.

The input peripherals supplied with the NetVista take a little getting used to, though. The mouse, while comfortable for both right- and left-handed people, doesn't include a scroll wheel, making moving around long documents or Web pages a chore. The keyboard is a small footprint design, but the layout is off-putting. The normal block of six keys above the cursor keys is replaced by a vertical strip of four, with the Home and End keys moved up between the half-sized function keys and the Print Screen key.

The keyboard may be small, but it's a different story for the bulky system case, which can possibly be attributed to the Pentium 4 CPU's cooling requirements. At 425 x 430 x 145mm (W x D x H), the unit is a lot larger than many of the office systems we've seen recently, especially from the likes of Acer and Fujitsu Siemens (see Labs, issue 85, p70). Of course, this won't matter if the box is being hidden away but, with its flat desktop orientation, its height could also cause ergonomic problems with the monitor on top.

With a Windows 2000 licence supplied, the NetVista is fine for smaller firms that don't have a volume Microsoft licensing agreement. Without a monitor, those upgrading an old system will gain the most from this machine. But while it's fine for the job, you could say that about almost any PC at the moment. And with the exception of IBM's usual hardware security system and supporting software, there's little that makes the M41 special.

The processor is overkill for its target market and doesn't perform ordinary office tasks like word processing and spreadsheet work as quickly as its competitors. This isn't a bad system, but there are far better-balanced systems available for office duties, like HP's Vectra VL420.