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.