IBM NetVista S42 Review

Little Big Blue

Last year, Mazda made a pitch to computer-savvy drivers by introducing a car named MP3. Today, BMW could do the same by calling its remodeled British compact not the Mini, but the Small Form Factor.

Space-saving, downsized desktops, especially paired with skinny LCD monitors, are catching on in both corporate and home offices. IBM knows it, even if its first pairing didn't fly -- the all-in-one NetVista X, a PC built into the back of an LCD monitor, Gateway Profile-style, has been replaced by the new NetVista S, which aims to fit a conventional PC into the smallest possible space.

How conventional? The NetVista S42 is a legacy-hardware-friendly design with two PCI slots plus parallel, serial, and PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports (as well as six USB 2.0 ports) and a 5.25-inch, half-height bay for ordinary CD or DVD drives, instead of notebook-style slimline optical drives.

IBM hopes IT managers will prefer this familiar architecture to the likes of HP's Compaq Evo D510 Ultra-Slim Desktop, which lacks expansion slots and legacy ports and obliges owners to buy proprietary, swappable MultiBay drives. (The Evo also peaks with Intel's 1.9GHz, 400MHz-bus Pentium 4, while the S42 is available with 533MHz-bus P4 processors up to 2.53GHz.)

How small? Though a fraction deeper and taller than the D510, the IBM is dwarfed by some unabridged dictionaries: The system measures 12.2 by 13.6 by 3.3 inches, only about one-third the volume of some of its NetVista desktop siblings, and can be positioned either horizontally (as a monitor stand) or on edge (using a supplied plastic base).

Does it work? Yes: We think the S42 could be just the ticket for corporate offices looking to put real PCs in the space of thin clients. It might even merit a glance from home-office consumers trying to set up shop in a tiny corner, though that's a longer shot -- its graphics are too slow for night-or-weekend gameplay; IBM has basically written off the quantity-one buyer (Big Blue hasn't offered desktops at retail since the long-gone Aptiva home PCs, and its Web site has only a fraction of the configuration choices of Dell's or Gateway's); and we're not overly impressed with what Big Blue touts as a revolutionary system-self-maintenance software bundle.

Don't Need Gigabit? You Got It

Our test system combined a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 (533MHz bus) with 256MB of PC2100 DDR, a 40GB hard disk, and 16X DVD-ROM drive. It's priced at $1,119 with no monitor, with a Web-site discount trimming that to $1,063 when we checked; the price includes an enterprise-ready Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, which -- in an example of the configuration limitations we mentioned -- neither the site nor a call to IBM's sales line let us downgrade to civilian 10/100Mbps Ethernet. (Nor can you find a larger hard disk or CD-RW drive on the site, apart from an external USB 2.0 CD burner for $349.)

The NetVista wins points with a first-class if slightly plasticky-feeling keyboard, and loses them with a low-class, mechanical two-button mouse -- you can step up to a smoother optical mouse with scroll wheel for $28 extra. Audio speakers are not included, though you can plug both headphones and a microphone into handy front-mounted ports, next to four of the USB 2.0 ports. The remaining two USB ports and duplicate headphone and line-out plus a line-in port are at the back, as are the parallel, two serial, two PS/2, and RJ-45 ports.