Compaq Computer UK Ltd mirrored its US parent’s comprehensive launch and price-cutting, reducing Prolinea prices and adding new Deskpro units and two Prolineas. Prices on existing Prolinea machines are cut by up to 19% to make way for the newcomers; typical buying price on the machines now starts at UKP720, down from UKP800. The Deskpro XE machines range from 25MHz 80486SX models up to 60MHz Pentium machines, and are based on the company’s own Qvision Local Bus implementation. It uses the company’s Truespeech business audio facility, to increase audio compression from 4:1 up to 15:1, and supports the Plug & Play AT expansion standard being developed with Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp. The machines can be supplied with up to 1.05Gb of storage. The network-ready Prolinea NT1/25s is based on the 25MHz 80486SX chip from Intel, but can be upgraded to the DX2/66 version. The Ethernet version features an on-board Intel Ethernet chip set, but there’s also a Token Ring version. Machines come diskless or with a 100Mb fixed drive. The Prolinea MT minitower model is the firm’s first AT minitower and comes in 33MHz 80486, DX2/50 and DX2/66 configurations with Pentium P24T upgradability. It has five 16-bit AT slots, comes with a standard 4Mb RAM upgradable to 64Mb, but on the largest hard drive size of 525Mb, standard RAM is 8Mb. The Deskpro XE model and the Prolinea Net1/25s comply with the US government’s Energy Star power saving standards. Also announced was the one year exclusive right to offer TabWorks, a Windows shell from XSoft, a divison of user interface expert Xerox Corp. The software is provided free along with on-line help on the new machines.
