CompUSA American Pro 366

CompUSA American Pro 366

SUMMARY

PRO: Great performance for the price, speakers sound quite good CON: Weak documentation, mediocre support experience in our anonymous calls

The third of four new Celeron-366­based systems to make our charts, the $1692 CompUSA American Pro 366 offers a good mix of price and performance. Its PC WorldBench score of 188 pegs its performance at between the levels of a PII-350 system and a PII-400 with 64MB of RAM running on Windows 98.

We found the 17-inch monitor's display to be slightly dark even at maximum brightness, but we were pleased with the quiet and solid keyboard. You need the strength of a stevedore to pry off the case's side cover, but once past it, you'll discover a clean, well-organized interior, with clear access to the slots and bays, and good ventilation. The Cambridge SoundWorks speaker and subwoofer set deliver excellent sound for their compact size. We ordered our test PC bundled with Microsoft's Office 97 Small Business Edition.

The limited system manual is available on screen only; you don't get a printed version at all. CompUSA backs its systems with a three-year warranty on most parts (the monitor is covered for just one year, however) and one year on labor. The vendor's technical support representatives are available by toll-free phone around the clock. In our latest round of anonymous calls to the company's tech support number, however, we had to wait about 15 minutes on average to get through to someone--and their performance was less than sterling. For example, one CompUSA representative told us that the only thing we could do when our keyboard stopped working was to reboot.