by Alan Crease: alan.crease@net.ntl.com

ONE DAY THE WORM WILL TURN...

If you want to get a notion of the sheer arrogance in the Wintel hegemony you only have to look at the recent disclosures from the Microsoft v Dept. of Justice hearings and Intel's most recent forays into the Courts.

If ever there were two companies which didn't seem bothered about being Mr. BAD Guy, it's these two. The arm twisting that Microsoft has been doing on even the biggest PC companies is extraordinary. Its attitude in past dealings with IBM is typical.

How to make friends and influence people (1):
"You can't have a licence for Windows unless you stop developing OS2"
"The price has gone up from $6 (yes, that's all that IBM were paying for Win 3.1) to $40!"
"If you drop OS2 we can arrange a discount."

Whisper. Did I hear that Dell is offering Linux on request?

How to make friends and influence people (2):

In December 1998 Intel signs an agreement with VIA Technology for the latter to make a chipset using the P6 bus (slot 1 for Pentium IIs).

TURNING WORM 1: The earlier background to this is that VIA and a number of major memory and motherboard manufacturers decide that they can't wait for the benefits of the new RAMBUS technology which is being propagated by Intel (with RAMBUS Corp.). It certainly won't be ready at a decent price until sometime in 2000. So, as a short-term measure, VIA and the boys push ahead with modest system improvements, opting for the current technology of SDRAM pushed to 133Mhz. This was not and maybe still is not in the Intel roadmap to a happy future. Intel's forthcoming 810 and 820 chipsets were not originally designed to work beyond a 100Mhz-bus speed. Now VIA and the boys are stepping out of line.

Intel starts fretting about VIA pushing ahead with the PC133 RAM bus standard. "We can't have you going faster than us or making it before us." -- Intel withdraws VIA's P6 licence

TURNING WORM 2: Meanwhile VIA takes a sideways tack to the loss of its P6 licence and buys CYRIX for $164m. With that purchase comes a long-standing Intel/National Semiconductor technology exchange cum licensing deal which gives VIA the right to the P6 bus again. Intel serves writ on VIA - "you're not entitled to use that licence, blah, blah, blah." It's a wonder they get any work done: lawyers, lawyers.

TURNING WORM 3: Shock horror! Someone else steps out of line. Abit produces a twin Celeron (socket 370) motherboard!? The Godfather is not amused. The cheapo Celeron was never intended to be used in a symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) environment and be placed in all those very expensive server cases. Think what would happen to Intel's profit margins if a tiny tweak to one pin on a processor means Celerons being substituted in 2's, 4's and 8's for PIIs and PIIIs. The essential processor core is the same in all cases. Steps are being taken on the retail boxed chips and in time in the fabrication plant. Black mark Abit.

It is also claimed, with AMD coming up on the rails, that Intel has told its large and medium sized users to remove competing processors from their ranges, otherwise they won't benefit from the Intel Inside program, nor the advertising support and discount pricing.

THE WORM SUB-DIVIDES: No wonder Wintel hate the idea of Linux; it's cheap, processor independent and doesn't use native x86 code. To make matters worse, Sun Microsystems has just bought Star Office, the top Linux "Office Suite". (Ed: (1) The way Sun are buying up/getting into bed with companies (such as AOL) and defending Java in the courts it strikes me they are acting just like Microsoft, yet they are considered the Good Guys. Why? (2) Star Office is also available for Windows - well it was before Sun bought it! It will be interesting to see if Sun support the Windows version. Stop Press - I've just seen Sun's Star Office 5.1 for Windows on PC Plus for November)

ANOTHER QUARTER OF A TURN: September 1999. VIA and SiS, the chipset makers, announce plans for major expansion, with plans to take 50% of the PC chipset market by 2001. Currently VIA, SiS and ALI have about 24% between them. VIA even talks about producing an SMP capable chipset from 2000 onward; full of AMD K7's no doubt.

BIG NEW WORM: AMD introduce the K7!

Ouch! 1. The new kid on the block is faster than you are.

Ouch! 2. SMP next year.

Ouch! 3. He doesn't use your P6 processor bus so he doesn't have to pay you any royalties. Ouch! Ouch!

Ouch! 4. AMD K7 uses "Alpha" bus from "Digital". ...? Does Compaq own all of Digital?

Ouch! 5. AMD announces the K6-2 500, promising continued onward and upward development.

Ouch! 6. Intel mess up the availability of the BX chipset at the same time as Taiwanese board makers reject - "they did what!" the first incarnation of the new 810 chipset.

When you're the size and power of Intel, these things don't quite add up to an annus horribilis but when you're used to dishing it out, these little left-jab counters get right up your nose.

YOU CAN' ALWAYS GIT WHA YU WAH-NN

You can' always git wha yu wah-nn, but if you try sometime, ... you GET WHAT YOU NEED... ohh yeah...

Following on from the last edition of the Journal and Bill Woods initial troubles with his upgrade, I have to disagree a little with some of Brian Grainger's comments about paying a premium and expecting everything to work first time.

For most purchases of components it is reasonably easy to find something which will work first time and keep working. Yes, you can buy too cheaply and the chances of failure will rise, but buying a set of components at a keen price doesn't necessarily mean buying unreliability. Building your own PC is fun and gives you a great sense of achievement. In my opinion Bill Wood didn't cut any particular corners: he was just unlucky. Sure, he had a defective motherboard, but he didn't buy the cheapest, but one with a reasonable pedigree from a known brand name. There's always a percentage that will fail, although the only data I ever seen on failure rates is on a web page for one of the PCchips group of Companies, an organisation with a pretty poor reputation in PC land in general. I think the info was on the PCware/Alton web-site (www.pcware.com) which quotes failure rates of 0.8% for motherboards and 1% for monitors.

However, brand is not a guarantee of perfection. You only have to read PC Magazine's annual reliability survey to see that. There are usually a small percentage of machines that are in true ER speak "Dead on Arrival". Remember, that just because it says brand "XYZ" on the front that it doesn't mean they assembled or tested it. Take Hewlett-Packard and its well-known Pavilion range. The last time I checked an OEM was clearly making it with the very unmarketable name of Fong-Kai (www.fkusa.com). Not only that, but when did the High Street brand give you the full specification. If you don't know that, you can't judge whether you're getting a fair deal. 48x CD-ROM, cor wow!! but where from?

Many other "BRANDS", especially at the lower end of the price scale, are manufactured by OEM's such as Mitac, First International (FIC) and Acer. The big brands might lay down the specification in detail, but they don't get their hands dirty after that. The same situation also applies to portables as well as the standard desktop PC. Even Compaq had to come clean on that score recently when someone hijacked a lorry load of laptop parts on the way to its Scottish assembly plant. The Taiwanese supplier Inventec made the claim on the insurance.

When it comes to motherboards, the biggest names, and I stress the word "names", commonly available to the upgrader are Aopen (Acer), Abit, ASUS, Chaintech, Gigabyte, Tyan and QDI. ASUS is obviously so recognisable as a sellable brand that it even suffered the flattering attention of the counterfeiters when 1000s of fake ASUS boards turned up, mainly in France I think: for info look up www.ASUS.com. It's all there including the pictures.

Amongst the smaller fry I'd suggest you take a look at TMC and my favourite, EPOX, at www.epox.com. They are rarely the favourite of the American overclocking community, (if you're thinking of having fun with overclocking try the ABIT BX6), but what they do offer is great stability doing what they are in intended to do. If you really want to be a mouse-potato like me, click on the independent test report links on the side of the home page.

Anyway where was I? Talking about cheapness. Back to the Hong Kong based PCchips Group of Companies, the biggest motherboard manufacturer in the world. Their branding is not well known over here except for the "PC100" logo, which also appears on video cards. On the web, look out for www.ability-tw.com, www.pcware.com (Alton) and www.amptron.com. All these companies carry the usual renamed chipsets such as TXpro and BXcel etcetera, with on-board audio, video and now modems, for £45 all in. So, how do you make a motherboard $25 - 30 cheaper than any other company. Part of the answer is being organised as a Group of vertically integrated companies with one part supplying the other. You have your own foundry for producing input/output controllers and cache-ram (I.T.E), your own factories, which together produce 15million motherboards a year, and do your own marketing and distribution. Efficient, yes, but you won't achieve a large cost reduction in the price of the most expensive individual components on the board, the chipset, each of which cost at least $20. There's little scope for savings on hardware when PCI sockets and the like probably cost less than 5p each.

So how do you reduce costs even further? The only place where various observers have suggested there is room for cutting costs is in the number and quality of the resistors and capacitors dotted about a typical board, with the largest cluster being around the power supply circuit. Fit the minimum number to make things work, and use low grade capacitors which "dry-out" in 3 years. The result is that electrical parameters become progressively out of sync and the user experiences random system failures. The crashes are usually blamed on software.

Is that how they do it? I couldn't possibly say.

When it comes to the rest of the components there are only so many sources to choose from, There are now more manufacturers of CD drives then there are hard drives. I personally would not leave home without a Western Digital and I know the same goes for Tony Gogay, another of this month's contributors. How often do you see that brand in the average OEM product? You won't very often, because they cost just a few dollars more. So there you get what you pay for, including a quieter operation. Many other components are much of a muchness.

My advice is to select key components such as motherboard and hard-drives carefully, and then tailor the other components to your needs. After all, if you're only going to run a selection of children's software and do some word-processing you don't deed a £120 graphics accelerator.

Use the web: never has so much computer information been available to assist an informed decision. Even if the info is really targeted at the trade, almost every computer parts manufacturer has a web-site. Usually from the "SUPPORT" link you can download bios updates (hopefully not too often), manuals, and technical bulletins, as well as evidence for all the hundreds of "incompatibilities" which still plague us today.

The following is a very very short list of typical mismatches:

1)	Probably the best known: AMD K6's 350Mhz and above won't work with WIN95 v2 because of a timing error. Microsoft's fault not AMD's. The fix is free on both web sites.
2)	Intel i740 video cards - known to be rather flaky when paired with some SiS chipsets.
3)	VIA's VPX chipset (mine), won't work with 64Mb DIMMs if they are 16x4mb, but will work with an 8x8 memory chip configuration
4)	Certain nVidia TNT video cards take umbrage when asked to co-operate with some ALI Aladdin chipsets.

 

When you've done all the bug checking you can then go out and buy on the web. Some companies are currently offering free carriage for web orders, but do compare with those that don't.

AND FINALLY...

Some gratuitous web humour; well it came to me by e-mail.

For anyone who has ever taught science:
"Some people can tell the time by looking at the sun, but I have never been able to make out the numbers."

Spoken with true clarity:
To most people, solutions mean finding the answers. To chemists, solutions are things that are still all mixed up.

When they broke open molecules they found they were only stuffed with atoms. When they broke open atoms they found them stuffed with explosives.

A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.

Genetics explains why you look like your father - and if you don't why you should.

Geography:
A monsoon is a French gentleman.

Science & Geography:
Water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212. There are 180 degrees between freezing & boiling because there are 180 degrees between north and south.

Construction:
A piece of broken tarmac goes into a pub. "I've just got off the M25, give us a pint guv'nor", he says to the barman.

The next day another piece of black tarmac comes into the pub and says, "give us a pint mate, I've just left the M1". The barman gives him a pint. While he's standing at the bar, a piece of red tarmac comes in and asks for a drink.

As the barman goes to the lager tap the black tarmac calls him over and says. "You don't want to serve his kind in here, you know; he's a cycle path."

Tourism:
In a Bucharest hotel lobby: "The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable."

In a Bangkok dry cleaners: "Drop your trousers here for best results."

In an advert by a Hong Kong Dentist: "Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists."