|
[ Go to February 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by Joel T. Patz
If you're an entrepreneur who needs a well-equipped PC for your office, the NEC Ready Office 1625 hits the bull's-eye with a good component selection and an excellent software bundle. The Pentium 166-based system includes 256KB of pipeline-burst level 2 cache, 32MB of EDO RAM, an NEC 8X CD-ROM, a built-in Iomega Zip Drive, a voice/fax modem and a 2.5GB Western Digital Caviar hard drive. However, a monitor is not included. The Ready Office has two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports on the back of the minitower. In addition to single parallel and serial ports, there's a MIDI game port and connections for a mouse and keyboard. Line in and out jacks as well as RJ-11 telephone jacks are also arrayed along the unit's back. The computer's design is unusual, with internal slots located at the top of the unit and external bays on the bottom-a disadvantage if it is situated on the floor. The system completed our Word and Excel macros in an average of 16 and 12 seconds, respectively. On our WINDOWS Magazine Wintune benchmarks, the Ready Office 1625 clocked an average of 302MIPS, demonstrated average video throughput of 12.67Mpixels per second and provided an uncached disk speed of 3.27MB per second. If you're looking for expandability, this system probably won't make the grade. It has one 5.25-inch external bay free and no free internal bays. Two PCI slots, one ISA slot and a shared PCI/ISA slot are available. For small businesses faced with budget restrictions, the NEC Ready Office 1625 provides good value.
|