Digital Thoughts: A retrospective look at personal computing. by Brian Cohen

Author:Brian Cohen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Audible Eye Publishing
Published: 2016-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

August 1, 1996

Off to school we go.

Before I begin this week’s column I would like to add a footnote to last week’s dissertation. As you may remember I mentioned two viruses that I had eradicated the previous week. One, Form, infected as many as 8 machines before it was discovered. It was finally traced down to an e-mail attachment from Vancouver. So if you're on the Internet and receive e-mail with attachments, be warned, they're out there!

Well, we are now in the dog days of summer and many of you are considering the purchase of a new system or upgrading your existing systems to handle the tasks ahead. High school graduates moving on to college or university are considering what the ideal system is and making that ideal fit into a budget.

For some the ideal is a notebook computer. They're powerful and portable, they can be fully featured with audio and CD-ROM but (there is always a but!), they are expensive. Where a typical Pentium 100 desktop system, fully loaded, can cost under $1,800, a notebook can easily exceed $4,000. Instead of having everything built-in, consider having the CD-ROM, for example, an add-on. External CD-ROM units can be purchased for under $250. As I've mentioned before, the little Daewoo "Solo" notebook is a best buy for under $2,000. It has a 486DX4/75 processor with 8MB RAM (expandable) 540MB hard drive, colour screen, IR port, external floppy drive (this makes it truly portable, weighing in at a little over 4lb, including battery), it even has a PCMCIA port for adding a fax/modem or network card.

Once we move over $2,000 there are more models to choose from. Acer has a Pentium 100 package that has some very impressive specifications for under $2,800 and Toshiba and AST have solid models that compete in the $3,000 class. All the machines have large hard drives, good memory expansion capabilities and a compliment of ports that make it expandable. With the exception of the Daewoo model, all the others weigh in around the 7lb mark. This may not seem like much, but when you add all the accessories that may or may not be required, that 7lbs ends up closer to 20lb! I don't know about you, but 20lb is a lot to lug around.

For the biggest bang for the buck, you still can't beat a solid desktop machine. Expansion is never a problem and is cost effective. Want to add 8MB or RAM, no problem. With RAM prices hovering around $80 for 8MB there is no excuse to not have at least 16MB in your system. CD-ROM drives start at not much more than a floppy drive and is considered a must. The first time you have to load Microsoft Office, or equivalent, by floppy disk you'll understand what I mean! Good ink jet printers can be purchased for a little over $200 for a monochrome model and about $100 more for a colour one. If you are in the market for a colour printer, however, pay a little more for a model that has the black and colour cartridges loaded together.

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