Sunflower EasyNow: A Colorful PC

If you’re looking for a PC to really add color–red, orange, blue, purple, or silver–to your desk, then this PC from BMI Technologies is for you. We reviewed one with a bright purple and green combo. 

Design

Another design aspect that will catch your eye is the PC’s size. It has dimensions of 240x190x260 mm and weighs only 3.5 kg. A handle on top would have also made it portable. One reason for its light weight is that it doesn’t have an internal SMPS; instead it has an external AC adapter for power. 

Two small speakers, matching the PC’s color, come with the PC and give acceptable sound quality. Its 24x CD-ROM drive is unconventionally placed vertically on the front panel. The drive’s central spindle locks the CD in place so it doesn’t fall out during operation. While this looks stylish, it can have several problems, like the lens being exposed when the drive’s cover is opened, and spending time in mounting a CD vertically.

This PC seems to be a completely sealed box. Further expandability, therefore, can be a problem. The essential components, however, have been integrated into the PC, which include graphics, sound, and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet network connectivity. It also has a built-in 56 K modem for Net surfing.

You can add external devices to it through its five USB ports, two at the front and three at the back. An optional USBfloppy drive is available for the PC. In fact, the PC comes with a translucent USB keyboard, which in turn has a PS/2 port for the bundled PS/2 mouse. The keyboard has power, sleep, wake-up and WWW button for accessing the Net.

Performance

Whereas the PC has a good design, it leaves a lot to be desired on the performance front, which is mainly due to its configuration. The system is based on a SiS 530 motherboard and has an AMD K6-II 500 MHz processor. The model we got came with 64 MB of RAM, out of which 4 MB is shared for the built-in graphics controller. It has a single DIMM slot that can take a maximum of 256 MB RAM. It has a 4.3 GB hard disk, but at a price you can replace it with a higher capacity at the time of purchase.

In the benchmarks, the PC scored 7.2 in Business Winstone 2001 and 6.9 in Content Creation Winstone 2001, which are really low compared to others. While the price tag of Rs 21,000 may seem attractive, it doesn’t include the price for a monitor and OS. It does have some bundled software, which include some multimedia utilities, Norton AntiVirus and Norton Ghost. 

Shekhar Govindarajan