Product Reviews

Microsoft has finally bitten the bullet and made its first venture into the PC arena. In a joint venture with British PC manufacturer Viglen, Microsoft is launching the Home Pro series of PCs.

As the name suggests, this new range of PCs is aimed at the home user and, in typical Microsoft tradition, is about as close to bloatware as hardware can get. The Home Pro4 has got pretty much every peripheral you can think of, and then some.

You can watch TV on it with the ATi TV tuner card. If you can lay your hands on a supply of DVD discs, you can play those on it too, using the Creative DVD-ROM drive and MPEG 2 decoder card. If you don't fancy watching your favourite movies on a PC monitor, the card has S-Video and composite video-out sockets, and a remote control and infrared receiver let you control everything without getting up from the sofa. The games player is also catered for, with a Microsoft SideWinder 3D analog joystick. To top it all, you get an Intel-manufactured USB camera and ProShare videoconferencing software.

Sound is taken care of by a Yamaha M25 subwoofer set and an integrated 16-bit Yamaha OPL3-Ax sound chip that sports wavetable synthesis. The speakers provide a surprisingly indistinct noise, however, with a loose, ill-defined bass and a tinny top-end that lacks any kind of substance. As you might expect, Microsoft supplies the mouse and keyboard complement: the IntelliMouse and ergonomic Natural Keyboard are both fine pieces of equipment.

Rounding off the external component line-up is a 17in Viglen/Microsoft rebadged ADI 5P monitor. This is an FST unit with a dot pitch of 0.27mm which displays resolutions up to 1,024 x 768 at a comfortable refresh rate

Three tiny buttons on the left 'chin' of the monitor control the on-screen display menu, which provides access to basic geometric picture controls and language settings. The monitor has a stable picture and focus remains consistently acceptable right into the corners of the screen. Even with the passthrough loop to the MPEG 2 card connected, the picture remains passable.

In itself, the Home Pro4 is a well-equipped office PC. At its heart is a Pentium II/266 processor with 32Mb of SDRAM to back it up. An Intel 440LX motherboard chipset glues everything together, and a Maxtor DiamondMax 7Gb UltraDMA drive and a 4Mb ATi Xpert@work AGP 2X graphics card completes the core components. Instead of a standard floppy drive, an LS-120 drive is installed for 120Mb of portable data storage, and a 33.6K fax/modem with voice capability sits in the very bottom ISA slot.

This surfeit of peripherals and expansion cards means there are only two PCI slots left free inside the substantial mini-tower case. The RAM, however, comes on a single DIMM leaving two slots free, and you get one front-opening 5.25in bay free below the DVD-ROM drive as well as two 3.5in bays: one internal, one external.

The software is predominantly supplied by Microsoft. Windows 95 comes pre-installed as standard, and Internet Explorer 4 is supplied on a separate CD-ROM if you're feeling brave enough to install it yourself. A copy of Works 4 comes with the Home Pro4, as well as Encarta 97, Autoroute Express Europe and a couple of games to fill in those moments of boredom - Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 and Deadly Tide.

Performance isn't anything out of the ordinary, but an overall score of 1.59 is perfectly respectable for a Pentium II/266-based machine running Windows 95. It's considerably slower than the Dotlink Pentium II/266 machine (reviewed p149), however, and even when you take into account the stack of peripherals and software included you only have to look at the price of the Dotlink machine to see that £2,553 is a lot of money to pay for a machine of this specification. The Viglen Home Pro4 may be well stacked, but the price is, too.