Unless youve been comatose for the last seven to eight years then you might have missed the growing fad for all things related to the Internet - that amorphous, heaving, abstract new medium that is in
Unless youve been comatose for the last seven to eight years then you might have missed the growing fad for all things related to the Internet - that amorphous, heaving, abstract new medium that is increasingly playing a larger role in many aspects of daily life. In fact, the Internet is one of the primary reasons that people are buying PCs these days, mainly in order to get involved with email and Web surfing.
While just about all PCs sold over the last couple of years have been net capable, the dedicated or specialised net PC is a breed all its own. This months PC Authority Labs acknowledges the phenomenon of systems targeted at the Internet user, and sets forth to find the best for your needs. The demographics show that there is no typical Internet user, and that the net appeals to all sorts, including school kids, retirees, university-educated professionals or hard-hatted blue collar workers - it works for all.
For this Labs the price ceiling was set to $2,000 and we deliberately emphasised features like the quality of the obligatory modem and other net-oriented peripherals. Performance, on the other hand, takes a back seat since it doesnt take the latest Pentium III with thousands of dollars of RDRAM to view the average Web page.
Occasionally a budget Labs can end up looking a little homogenous due to the price limit restricting the kinds of features that can be included in the system, though not so here. In this Labs we found products wide in range and capability, from desktop to tower to NLX (pizza box) form factors; from Celeron 466 to Pentium III/500s to Athlon CPUs. One contender even managed to squeeze a printer and scanner into the $2,000 ceiling, on the assumption that the purchaser is likely to be an entry-level user, and thus in need of the whole kit.
The last word belongs to the issue of signing
up for Internet access with an ISP. There are many issues to consider including levels of service provided, nationwide accessibility and surfing speeds. While covering all these is a Labs in itself, we do take a peek at an intriguing alternative to conventional modem ISPs with the latest in satellite access. While satellite is still in its infancy and out of the budget of most users, it represents an alluring new technology that should play a bigger role in the future of net access.
Labs Editor David Lin
Contributors Tim Dean, Tremayne Sargeant