PCs ride wave of easy access and lower cost

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Gateway's $1699 Neo neatly illustrates two linked trends in personal computing: the cheap "all-in-one" PC and the promise of an easy connection to the internet.

PCs such as the Neo are aimed not just at first-timers, but also at existing users who are looking for a second or even third machine.

There is nothing new about the all-in-one design, but the concept was reborn when Apple launched its iMac last year. Its runaway success, attributed to a stylish, compact design and an advertising campaign that promised to get you online very quickly, was not lost on Windows-based manufacturers, and a host of look-alikes soon appeared.

In the United States, emachines' eOne, a sub-$US1000 ($1976) PC that owed a lot to the iMac in appearance, rapidly took emachines from nowhere to become the fifth-ranking consumer PC manufacturer.

It also drew a lawsuit from Apple.

The latest manufacturer to jump on the no-frills internet bandwagon is Dell with its webPC, launched in the US last week starting at $US999.

The webPC retains the conventional two-box arrangement of screen and system unit, but has standardised on the convenient and friendly USB (universal serial bus) interface to connect everything.

Neo, by contrast, puts the screen in the same housing as the 400MHz Intel Celeron processor, the 4.3Gb hard drive, CD-Rom and floppy drives, and stereo speakers. The big advantage here is that it does away with the untidy nest of cables, and results in a system that is easy to move from room to room.

The downside of all-in-ones is that you cannot replace the screen with a larger one later, and the 64Mb of memory is not expandable. While the Neo offers a perfectly adequate specification now, in a couple of years it may well be showing its age and the upgrade options will be more limited than conventional PCs.

The Neo certainly lives up to the advertising claims that it is easy to put together, with a large illustrated poster that outlines the six steps.

This boils down to plugging in the power cable, connecting the phone line, mouse and keyboard, switching on and then following on-screen instructions.

The first five steps were certainly very easy and the Neo was ready to be switched on about 3 minutes and 40 seconds after taking it out of the box.

Simple USB plugs connect the keyboard and mouse, and the only slightly fiddly item was an adapter required to get the US-type phone connector to go into a New Zealand BT-type socket.

Step 6 - following the on-screen instructions - turned out to be far more time-consuming. This was not really Gateway's fault as much of the delay occurred while complying with Microsoft's registration procedures, including entering a 25-digit Windows serial number.

This rather daunting process is a bit like asking a new mother to register a birth at the moment of delivery. It would be helpful if Microsoft allowed a short period of grace here.

Once the time zone had been set for the system clock, the Windows theme music played and the Neo was ready to go 12 minutes after leaving the box.

The next step, connecting to the internet, proved to be the most fraught - but once again the blame did not lie at Gateway's door. A friendly "Wizard" is provided to automatically guide the user through the process of either setting up a new internet account or using an existing one.

Picking the automatic existing account option, the Neo proceeded to ring an Auckland number to access the Microsoft Internet Referral Service, which maintains a list of ISPs and their access numbers. This call appeared to get through but the connection was immediately dropped on each of four tries.

Giving up at this point, we picked the manual setup option. All that was required here was to enter the 0867 telephone number to access the ISP, the user login name and the password.

Finally, 34 minutes after unpacking, the Neo was successfully connected to the internet, after failing on the first attempt for some unknown reason.

The internet status utility showed that this connection was achieving a healthy 50,666bps, which interestingly was a good deal better than a much faster Pentium III-based PC has achieved using the same account.

The simple reason was that the Neo was set up right next to the phone jack, while the faster PC was connected by a 25m extension cable.

Despite the speed of the connection, it took another minute and 45 seconds to fully download the first page from Gateway's "welcome" site.

Overall, running the Neo was a lot easier than many other PCs but there is still plenty about going online for the first time to scare technophobes.