Who says local PCs cannot compete with the international products?

Who says local PCs cannot compete with the international products?

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): In terms of PC technology adoption, Indonesia
has always been on the fast track, even though the economic
crisis has drastically reduced the number who can afford new
technology the moment it becomes available here.

Case in point: As Intel launched its latest generation of
microprocessors, the Pentium III, its local original equipment
manufacturer (OEM) partners already were offering personal
computers (PCs) equipped with the latest and fastest processors.
And this time I was lucky enough not to have to wait too long to
get a taste of them. Courtesy of PT Multicom Persada
International, I was able to test drive an exciting machine
powered by a Pentium III 450 MHz processor.

Multicom is one of the three leading local PC makers which are
fully supported by Intel Indonesia. The other two are PT
Zyrexindo and PT Galva Technologies Corp. On the local market,
Multicom's PCs carry the Mugen brand. This computer maker, which
has been making PCs since 1984, is not really known for low
prices, but the carefully selected components which they put in
every PC they build justify the prices.

To start with, my test system came with a decent speaker
system from Altec Lansing. It had a pair of satellite speakers
and one very powerful subwoofer, making listening to Ettore
Bastianini's tenor voice singing Largo al factotum from Rossini's
The Barber of Seville quite enjoyable.

My test system had 64 MB of SDRAM. While 16 MB is generally
regarded as the minimum requirement to run Windows '95 and 32 MB
the minimum to run Windows '98, you should have a minimum of 64
MB of RAM if you want to avoid a bottleneck in a Pentium III
system. Most high-end PCs nowadays are shipped standard with 128
MB of RAM.

The ATX casing was sturdy and quite handsome. It came with a
36x CD-ROM instead of a DVD-ROM drive, and a pair of USB ports.
The monitor which came with this PC was a very nice 15 inches. It
displayed sharp text and brilliant colors with very good
contrast. This monitor also had a slew of controls which, in the
past, only could be found in high-end and larger computer
monitors. The controls, such as vertical shift and geometry
correction, were easy to adjust. Although there was no on-screen
display, the icons under each LED clearly indicated which
function was active.

The Yamaha sound card already was built into the motherboard,
and Multicom had installed Station for me so that I could play my
Opera Weekend CD over and over. I didn't bother to take out the
keyboard or mouse which they had included in the box. I just used
my own IBM keyboard, which has a TrackPoint on it, and both
worked flawlessly with the PC. The hard disk was a fast 3 GB
Quantum Fireball, which actually was not big enough for a PC of
this class.

Test results

Intel Corp. supplied me with a set of test programs.
Unfortunately, since there were no other Pentium III machine to
compare performances against, the figures shown in the
accompanying picture don't really mean much.

However, my informal tests did give some impressive results.
The time to reboot -- from the moment I hit the Enter key after
selecting Restart until the time the system was ready to run an
application -- was only 45 seconds for the Mugen PC as opposed to
three minutes on a Compaq Presario with an AMD 233 MHz processor.
Of course the larger memory space of the Mugen PC, the slower
Seagate hard disk on the Presario and the fact that the latter
was loaded with more information were significant contributing
factors in the wide gap between their reboot times.

Still, loading CorelPHOTO-PAINT took only 24 seconds on the
Mugen PC as opposed to two minutes and 10 seconds on the
Presario. If you work on your computer 10 hours a day and you
need to reboot your system frequently, buying a machine powered
by a Pentium III can actually increase your productivity.

Unfortunately, though, I could not get the latest version of
Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the test, so I was unable to see how
much shorter the training time for speech recognition was with
the Pentium III processor. Nonetheless, the Pentium III powered
Mugen was clearly a fast machine. It's really a nice PC to work
with, although, sadly, I could only keep it for two weeks.

Our PC market

Some notes are in order here. First, the prices of low-end PCs
are falling like crazy, and this is squeezing the profit margins
of PC makers operating in this segment. Compaq, for instance,
sold the most PCs in the United States last February, according
to a report from PC Data. While Compaq's sales in terms of units
rose 4.9 percent over the previous month, their revenue dropped
by 17 percent. This provides us with a clear indication of how
difficult it will be for vendors to survive in the PC business in
the future. Therefore, our local PC makers, including Multicom,
Zyrexindo and GTC, must really work hard to find innovative ways
to reduce costs in order to maintain their viability.

At the same time, competition in the Indonesian PC market is
now even tougher with the arrival of Gateway, the second largest
build-to-order PC vendor in the U.S. On the brighter side,
though, once we emerge from this economic crisis, demand for new
PCs will definitely soar as people realize they cannot live or
work without them. So, let's all pray that the makers of our
"National PC" survive this difficult period along with the rest
of us.