Designed for 80486- and Pentium-based machines, it is also designed to support Windows NT when it becomes available.

Intel Corp let manufacturers off the leash yesterday and freed them to announce officially that they had Pentium-based machines.

The school computer centre has a network of Dell servers and 300 Pentium-based machines which run on a broadband fibre optic backbone.

Analysts have expected widespread price cuts for Pentium-based machines in the fourth quarter.

In the last column, I mentioned that I had ordered a new 166-megahertz Pentium-based machine, but I did not give its brand name.

That could cut the cost of the Pentium-based machines sold by high-volume PC makers to less than $1,500 by late next year.

But many assume that there will be a temporary shift away from Pentium-based machines, at least until Intel has made much clearer how it intends to solve the problem.

Machines using it will be in the £4,000 region, but so will Pentium-based machines to begin with.

But sales of Pentium-based machines still fell markedly from those in previous days, James Ryall, a salesman, told Bloomberg Business News.

Thirty computer vendors have committed themselves to building systems with Intel's new chip, which will come out in 1999 and promises to run programs written for today's Pentium-based machines.