PC FAQs & Answers

I was reading some of my earlier articles this week. One of the first was about buying a computer. Since that time, computers have changed quite a bit so I thought the same topic might be of interest.

One of the first things to consider is the name brand. Some of your bargain computers have architecture that is not standard to the industry. For example, you used to see Packard Bells everywhere.

Some of the earlier 486 sold with Win3.1 could not be upgraded to Win95 due to their non-standard architecture of the system board. So, with Win98 due to be released on June 25, it is best to stay with a good name brand.

Also a Intel TX chipset system board is the latest Pentium compatible with cutting edge technology. It was designed to take full advantage of the MMX technology. Almost all TX chipset system boards have a USB Universal Serial Bus. USB is a new standard in serial ports that will soon take the place of its ageing predecessor.

USB has ten times the transfer rates, installs its own drivers, and can be connected while the PC is running. When determining memory requirements, a minimum of 16 meg, preferably 32 and 64 if you multi task several powerful programs.

The computer's drives are becoming more standardized. The 3 1/2" high density 1.44 megabyte floppy drive is common to all PC's. The CD ROM speed has increased to 100X max. That's 100 times the transfer speed of the original CD ROM.

The hard drive should be at least 2 Gigabyte. Here, the more real estate the better. A small hard drive will acquaint you with the expertise of disk maintenance but, that's the only good thing about it.

The two most CPU intensive peripherals are video and sound. From the very beginning video has been the bottle neck on the IBM PC. Consequently the standards for these two keep changing, like the addition of 3D. Some software programs will not install unless there is a 3D video and 3D sound card present.

The newest standard in video is the AGP Accelerated Graphics Port. It is still in its infancy but boasts of high video throughput. A good quality 3D video card with at least 1 meg of ram, preferably more, is sufficient. The sound card should be 3D as well and Sound Blaster compatible.

The only thing left is the operating system. Until Win98 is released, Win95 rev.2 or OSR2 as it is commonly known is the best you can get. It is also year 2000 compatible. You can expect about 6 months of glitches and bugs with the new Win98. Stay with these guidelines when buying a computer that won't be outdated too quickly. Unfortunately, some on sale computers being sold are already outdated.