Sahara PC    Price: Rs 11,500 Key Specs: Celeron D 2.13 GHz, 845GV based MSI motherboard, Samsung 52x CD ROM, 128MB DDR333 RAM, internal modem  Contact: Sahara Computers & Electronics. Tel: 1600 180 7235. E-mail: info@saharacomputers.co.in  RQS# E61 or SMS 131261 to 9811800601

The
Sahara
10k PC (actually a thousand and a half mre) has a fairly high-end hardware as
compared to the products we reviewed before in this range. It features a Celeron
D 2.13 GHz processor with 256MB L2 Cache, 128MB of DDR333 memory from Samsung
and a 40GB 7200RPM drive.

The machine came loaded with RedHat Linux WS. While using
the machine, everything seemed to be running just fine and with minimal lag.
With multiple windows of Mozilla, Evolution (mail client) GNumeric
(spreadsheet), the system ran without any lags. The problem came up when we
tried running OpenOffice which is  known
to be a memory hog, and the system took forever to open even a simple word
document! We just fail to understand why vendors are shipping un-optimised OS
with machines that don’t have hardware to handle heavy software. We tested the
machine by running AB Word on it and it ran just fine. So if you buy this
machine, we suggest you do away with OpenOffice and go in for other lighter
office suite. Overall, we are very

impressed with this machine.
Sahara
has used top notch parts from vendors such as MSI, Samsung and Intel. They have
proved that just because it is a low cost PC, it need not be compromised upon.

Bottom Line: While
Sahara
has used fairly decent hardware, they should bundle an optimized Linux version
to make it perform  better. Switching
off the un-necessary services running in the background gave little performance
difference, in terms of general usage, between this machine and some high-end
hardware we have seen.

Varun Dubey