Personal Computers

By Carter B. Horsley

The state-of-the-art in consumer personal computers (as opposed to professional workstations) in early 1998 reached a very high plateau.

Indeed, by the end of the year it is likely that available models may well be pretty close to "perfect." Technology, of course, will not stop accelerating, but for the vast majority of users the new machines, just now on the horizon, may well be more than adequate for virtually all their needs for several years.

We are talking, naturally, about the top-of-the-line machines, not the bargain-basement PC's (that are now offering great values for many users). Fully loaded top-of-the-line PC's still cost upwards of $4,000 even as the $1,000 barrier at the lower end has been broken.

The current high-end crop still falls short of the mark. (See The City Review's article, Hell 2.)

The ideal personal computer will include the following:

• A Pentium II chip operating internally at 100 or megahertz (as opposed to 66 megahertz on the "300" and "333" megahertz models) and 300 or more megahertz externally.
• An Advanced Graphics Port (AGP) video controller that fully implements all of that standard's features relating to 3D rendering and texture maps (as opposed to the vast majority of first generation AGP cards that fit into the special expansion slot but offer very few of the features).
• A hard drive of 9 or more gigabytes that is manufactured to meet specifications needed for recording complex audio/visual material. (These drives are available at a premium but are usually not installed in off-shelf PC's and the difference is in their ability to deliver uninterrupted flows of data to CD-ROMs and DVDs of a professional quality without dropped sound bits or frames.)
• A hard drive that is unpartitioned and formatted in the FAT-32 system that has been available for a while but not installed by many major vendors for inexplicable reasons. The FAT-32 system is a refinement of the former FAT-16 system that is the "file allocation table" for the hard drive that controls the size of storage clusters on the drive and permits smaller clusters and therefore less wasted space. The difference between the systems can amount to about a third of the total.
• The PC's should have adequate expansion slots and many of the new systems do not because much of the industry is planning to abandon entirely the ISA-bus standard in favor of the wider and faster PCI standard. The problem is that many major components such as soundcards and modems are still not available on PCI boards and that many upgrading users, the vast majority, have "legacy" ISA boards, such as custom SCSI ISA-cards for Hewlett Packard scanners, and should not have to buy new versions of equipment that otherwise works well. A new top-of-the-line Dell Computer Corporation Dimension XPS D300 PC purchased in the fall of 1997, for example, had only two ISA slots that were filled with a soundcard and a modem, three vacant PCI slots and the AGP slot. This total of 6 slots is not really adequate for many serious users and major vendors should offer larger towers with more expansion capabilities, not only for slots on the motherboard but also for drive bays. A serious user today might want not only a 3-and-a-half inch floppy drive, but also a 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drive, a ZIP drive, a Ditto tape back-up drive, a CD-ROM recorder drive, and a DVD-drive, a total of six externally available drives, rather than the four, or less, available on most major models. This proliferation of modules reflects the fabulous advances in multimedia technology, but presents very serious problems with regard to the shortage of available IRQs and computer "addresses" of the operating systems. The operating systems only will recognize 16 different IRQ addresses and many of these are allocated to hard drive controllers, internal clocks, keyboards and the like. As a result, different devices may compete for the same IRQ address and present "conflicts" in which the computer will not recognize the module, which is extremely frustrating, to say the least. I have not been able to recognize my scanner for several months, as an example. There are three possible solutions, none perfect: use SCSI devices that can be chained; use Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices that can be chained; use parallel-port devices that can be switched on external devices. The USB port is quite new and very few components are yet shipping that are equipped with it. SCSI is quite complicated and not infrequently difficult to set up correctly. Parallel port connections are slower than the other two alternatives. Finally, the digital interface known as Firewire promises superb integration and communication with other digital components such as digital camcorders and will permit perfect copying of digital material. This interface now costs about $1,000 as an expansion board and is not widely available, but is clearly the best interface to have, assuming that one's digital external components also have it (most new top-of-the-line consumer digital camcorders now include it). The perfect computer will include all of these interfaces.
• The new 19-inch monitors are superb, but pale in comparison with the new, thin, "flat" screens that are very expensive. Eventually, this technology will become more reasonably priced and such products are obviously very desirable as they take up much less desktop space. One should not rush too quickly into these large screens that resemble those on the newer and more expensive laptops until the problem of "bad" pixels is improved as the dropped-out pixels are quite annoying.
• Speed is no longer quite as critical. For word-processing and spreadsheets, even 133-Pentiums are more than adequate, but the new, bloated programs full of multi-media features work quite well on 300-Pentium II's. The 300's do make a marked difference in many graphics programs, but not as much as one might have expected. Graphic users will always want more speed, but the difference between a 300 and a 400 are not substantial. A 1000-megahertz chip will be considerably faster, but not truly awesome. A Ferrari perhaps, but one that will not get through New York City traffic, or the bloated software programs, all that much faster.
• Laptops, of course, are a different matter. The new 14-inch screens are impressive and the better models now incorporate the AC adapter and modem connections, and have some interchangeability of components like a second battery, or a second hard-drive, and the CD-ROM drive. Laptops, unfortunately, will not become true desktop replacements for most power users until they incorporate more interchangeable components and also offer an expansion bay, or more PC-card slots. Some, of course, do have "docking stations," but they are cumbersome and a bit fragile for heavy use.

What is wonderful is that the mainstream machines keep getting cheaper and are very close to being adequate for a considerable length of time, like television sets. Of course, high-definition TV is coming and that will raise our sights in terms of memory requirements and the speed and bus widths to push all that much more data through our systems/networks....