Not on the cutting edge - Leading Edge Products' WinTower 486 multimedia PC - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, July, 1994 by Angela Gunn

Rating: **

Leading Edge WinTower 486

List Price: $2,999

Average Street Price: $2,600

Manufacturer: Leading Edge Products, (508) 836-4800, (800) 874-3340

WIN / DOS

The WinTower 486 from Leadign Edge kept us, unfortunately, on edge. If price is your main consideration and you crave a single-box multimedia PC, you might find its quirks worth getting used to. If you need top-line video or a machine for going online, however, the advantages are minimal.

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The 66-MHz Win Tower DX2 configuration we tested ships with 8MB of RAM, a 340MB hard drive, two floppy drives, a double-speed CD-ROM drive, a fax/modem, a 1MB SVGA local bus video card, and a 16-bit SoundBlaster card. The $2,999 bundle also comes with a 15-inch monitor, headphones and MLI-168 speakers, and the usual input devices. There are several different software bundles available; we saw the Entrepreneur set, which included CD-ROM versions of The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Action! SE (a multimedia presentation maker), and PhoneDisc USA Business, as well as preinstalled versions of Microsoft Works, Microsoft Money, and the Prodigy (DOS) online service interface software.

The CDs and software are well chosen, and although the disks are not included (there are no DOS or Windows disks, either), the system groups the files so they can be copied to disk for backup.

These were not the problems. The problems came one by one, as we used all these fine toys. Performance didn't dazzle; there's only a 64K cache on this machine, and disk speeds were below average. The system gave us several inexplicable errors when running CDs other than those it shipped with.

Some of the hardware also gave us pause. The 15-inch monitor was reasonably crisp, but try as we might, we simply couldn't finesse the display's brightness or contrast enough for our tastes. We also found ourselves making significant monitor adjustments as we moved between DOS and Windows.

We were similarly dismayed when we looked under the hood: The fax/modem is a mere 9,600/2,400 bps. Given that the street price for a 14,400 bps internal fax and data modem is around $150, we feel that Leading Edge is being unnecessarily stingy with an often-used component.

For the most part, construction is solid. The tower is compact and the components are installed well. Overall, this machine is a comprehensive if unexciting bundle for the most price-conscious shoppers.

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