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Follow UsThis PC, aimed at the home user, comes bundled with several goodies, which include Logitech’s Webcam, Altec’s Lansing speakers with sub-woofer, a mic, an internal modem, and a 100-hour Internet account from
NetCracker.
Design
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This compact PC has notches on both sides of the cabinet and a handle on top for conveniently lifting and moving it. It comes in an attractive white and gray color scheme, and a white- colored 15” monitor. The black- colored Lansing speakers that come bundled with the PC produce excellent quality sound, but do not match with the rest of its color scheme.
For ease of use, the Voyager has ports at the front and at the rear. On the front panel you’ll find ports that are more frequently used–two USB, mic, speakers, and headphone. However, since they’re located at the bottom of the front panel, they are difficult to see and you have to lift the PC to plug-in any device. On the rear panel you’ll find a serial, parallel, VGA, two PS/2, four USB, and audio ports for line in/out, mic, and game port.
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Wipro Voyager Flex |
| Price: Rs 52,000 Features: PIII/850 MHz, Intel 810 chipset, onboard audio and graphics, 64 MB RAM Pros: Lots of bundled goodies, padlock for security, and excellent sound from speakers Cons: CD-drive mounted vertically, average performance Contact: Wipro. Tel: 080-8440011 Fax: 8440048. HO, Sarjapur Road Complex, Bangalore 560035. E-mail: sjm@wipro.co.in www.wipro.co.in |
The CD-drive is placed vertically inside the cabinet to save space. However, just like in the other machines with vertical CD drives that we’ve reviewed in this issue, it’s difficult to insert and pull out CDs from the vertical drive. Unlike some of the machines, however, this one comes with a floppy drive, which is useful. It also has a padlock at the rear for locking it up.
Its keyboard has a tray in the front for resting your palms, and comes with additional buttons for accessing the Internet, e-mail, and volume adjustment. On the expandability front, it has one PCI and AMR slot, but since the former is already taken up by a modem, you can’t add anything further to the machine.
Performance
The PC we reviewed came pre-installed with Windows Me. It sported a PIII/850 MHz, 64 MB RAM and a Seagate U5 20 GB hard disk on an ASUS CUW-FX motherboard based on Intel 810 chipset. The software bundle included a Windows Me recovery CD, Microsoft Works, McAfee AntiVirus 5.11, Simon and Schuster new millennium encyclopedia, and BitWare for Windows.
On the performance front, we tested the PC for productivity and high-end applications using Business and Content Creation Winstone 2001. It scored 20.8 and 19.9 respectively in the two benchmarks, which are slightly low. An additional 64 MB RAM should help improve things.
Neelima Vaid