BPL CyberCom Smart Home PC

This PC is based on a P4 1.8GHz/D-Link 845GL board with onboard video (32 MB shared), 128 MB DDR RAM and a 40 GB HDD. The OS choice is between Win XP Home Edition SP1 and RedHat Linux 9. The unit we reviewed had Win XP, and it performed quite well scoring 40.9 Winstone Units on BW 2001 and 48.6 on the CCW 2001 benchmarks. It also gave frame rates of 54.2 fps at 800x600 with 32-bit color depth in Quake 3 Arena, which is good considering it's with the onboard video. These scores are equivalent to P4 2 GHz CPUs with similar configurations. It had a 10/100Mbps LAN card, a 56 Kb/sec internal modem, a FireWire port, two PS/2 and two USB 2.0 ports. Logitech, Kobian and Samsung have contributed components as OEM units. The BPL monitor has an auto de-gaussing feature that activates each time you power on the PC.

The speakers are unaesthetic though the sound is excellent. The headphone-mic set is of good quality. The PC comes with only a 52X LG CD-ROM drive, while other PCs are shipping with DVD/combos. There are no Restore CDs to recover the PC to factory defaults. The dealer network is also a little patchy outside Kerala. There is only one free PCI slot and one DDR slot on the board. Extra bays to slot in hard disks and CD/DVD drives on its rather large ATX cabinet are available though.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T
Price	:	Rs 33,990 (one-year onsite warranty)
Key Specs	:	P4 1.8GHz, 128 MB DDR RAM and a 40 GB hard disk
Contact	:	BPL Telecom, Palakkad
Tel	:	2573151/60.
E-mail	:	btlpkd@vsnl.com

Overall, areasonably priced, branded desktop.

Sujay Sarma