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THOUGHTS AND TANGENTS
by
Alan Crease: 
alan.crease@net.ntl.com
INDUSTRY WATCH
For some time now I've been checking the market for new developments, as I've volunteered to build two PC systems for my granddaughter Hollie and her school friend Toby. Now at the age of 6 she isn't very demanding - she needs just the odd bit of multimedia for teaching and fun, and the two sets of parents are pretty green when it comes to matters computing.
It's now May '99, so what do I choose to buy that will have a little bit of future proofing built in. A fairly basic design should suffice, but do I opt for socket 7, socket 370 or even a slot. If the rumours are true the slot will shortly be phased out for yet another socket. In processor terms 300Mhz is fine and dandy, and probably the lowest commonly available, but that level will be at least 400Mhz by the run up to Christmas.
Once the respective "dads" get to grips with the computers they'll probably want to play a few games when the littl'uns have gone to bed. However, that will probably be some time into 2000 so they can upgrade the video/graphics system at a later date.
Good socket 7/super 7 motherboards are plentiful and the AMD K6ii and iii will do just fine. But what's just happened: Nat-Semi (CYRIX) have just announced that they're withdrawing from the mainstream PC market, so the Mii (currently available at 366Mhz) is going to rapidly disappear (look out for dumping of the chips to clear the inventory). By the way, INTEL has already stopped manufacturing 366 Celerons. Current sales for the next 9 months plus will be taken from stock. That only leaves AMD to fill the socket 7's, and will probably speed up the demise of that socket format.
No one doubts the quality of the current Celerons, but the cost increase over the socket 7 option is something like £50 per system. In a total budget of about £600, that's a substantial proportion.
Pity the poor consumer who has some idea of what to look for, when the rest of the world is all hooked on Megahertz! 600 Mhz will be the norm before the end of this year. Intel have already told their major OEM's, such as Dell and Compaq, that the price of various Pentium IIs and IIIs will be lowered four times between May and September, to half of what they are now! Do you get the feeling that Intel in particular is trying to move so fast that it is leading every body a merry dance, including itself? It appears that without the competition, from AMD in particular, Intel would never have moved so fast. I suspect the PIII was originally envisaged to be a quantum leap in performance when partnered with the new Rambus RAM technology. The trouble is no one can get the new RAM to work properly and achieve decent yields. Intel has thrown $100 million dollars, (I knew I'd have a use for a shifted - 4 one day; Ed: I just hope I never have to use the Alt Gr 4 on the keyboard with my new PC; it has curious circular e symbol with 2 bars in the middle), at Samsung and said "sort it and get it produced by next week". The quicker it's ready the sooner we can distance ourselves from AMD's K7.
The motherboard and chipset manufacturers now look like "piggy in the middle". They are moving, at least in the short term whatever that will be, to an intermediate RAM technology called DDRAM (Double Data Rate RAM). This will be based on a 133Mhz bus - well that's for the RAM bus at least. I assume the main system bus will stay at 100Mhz for the time being. Eventually this situation will lead to Ram running at DDR i.e. 2 x 133 = 266 Mhz. New motherboards, new chipsets, new RAM; what next, and all within the next 4 or 5 months.
The gap between Intel and the other processor minions is growing. AMD can't make chips fast enough, the K7 release date is said to be slipping and they don't have enough fabrication plant capacity. Hang on a minute. Cyrix and it's South Portland fab' is up for sale. Nah! It would never work. It's too simple.
So with all that turmoil promised for the next 6 months what would you do? Settle for an old cheap socket 7 topping out at about 450/500 Mhz or opt for a pricier socket 370 capable of perhaps 600Mhz?
(Ed: I have had the same problem over the last few months. The amount of money I had to spend was slightly higher and I do not play games, but trying to decide what to get is a problem. I have agonised for ages and things got to a head as my disk space started to run out! Each off the shelf machine I looked at was almost but not quite right. Changes now happen so fast you cannot hope to future proof the harware for longer than six, (or is that three), months so just get what you want as cheap as you can. I stick by Intel and I prefer to have my machine built for me so I went to a local PC shop and bought a Pentium II - 350 with 128Mb RAM and 10Gb hard drive. It has other bits and bobs to suit my needs and I will add some more in due course but the cost was just over £1000 inc. VAT. If I built it myself from bits I could probably have saved about £150. With 64Mb RAM and a Celeron you would meet Alan's target price. The only way you can cope with this crazy, change every five minutes industry, is to (a) procrastinate for ever or (b) just go out and get something bearing in mind that next year its second hand value will be 0-25% of what it costs you!)
PARTITION MAGIC.
I said in the December (paper) edition that I would try to look into the feasibility of using Partition Magic 3 as a back-up tool, when you're fortunate to have a separate hard-drive. After all, it does appear to be cost effective for the average non-business home user.
From experience I would suggest the first thing to do is to GET ORGANISED. It is best to decide how many partitions you wish to have on each physical hard-drive and match them on each drive. So for example you might want 3 partitions on each drive and possibly use one partition just for WIN 98 / WIN 95 / 3.1 / DOS whatever, with only data on another partition. There is no need to worry about not having an exact match in sizes of the partitions, as the program will "truncate" the target partition for you toward the end of the copy process.
Don't do anything yet, just read the manual. I found myself reading certain parts of it many times over just to get an idea of the concepts such as "free space", "defined partitions", "active partitions" and extended partitions.
However, the start of the process is not without problems. Assuming "C" is your hard drive and "D" is your CD drive, then once the second physical drive is installed (formatted etc.) it will automatically be assigned the letter "D" and your CD will be renamed as device "E". This only becomes an irritation with some software, such as encyclopaedias, which was originally installed from the old "D" cd-drive and needs the CDROM in the drive to function. The next time you go to use that software it might tell you it can't find the CDROM disc on "D". The better ones will ask you if you've changed the designator letter for the drive and reconfigure themselves. I make an assumption at this point that the operating system may be playing some part in this process.
As for the actual "copy partition" process I suggest you "scandisk" and "defrag" before you run PM, just to remove those developing errors. Next, run PM and select the target partition. You will then need to delete it as a partition: this creates "empty space". At this stage it may be sensible to re-boot the machine and run PM again. Now select the target "empty space" and the "source partition" : copy. How long does it take? Well, I copied a 510mb partition with 280mb of data and 220mb blank, onto the second empty 1.6gb hard-drive. Including the formatting, truncating of the target partition and various validation checks it took 5min 12 secs. After that, select the backed-up partition and make sure you render it "hidden" as opposed to "active". Re-boot and you should be back to square one. The complete back-up will therefore be related to the number of partitions on the source drive. So far so good, but the organising beforehand is as important as the program.
END PIECE
As seen yesterday on 'Message of the Day' on my Borough Council office computer:
"The count-down millennium clock on the Town Centre tower has been turned off because it has developed a fault. It will not be fixed for some days, as the IFR (maintenance Co.) technician has gone sick."
If that doesn't take the M.B. I don't know what will.
