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June 27, 1998
News
- More freebies! I’ve got several copies of Windows 98 and
a headset microphone to give away this week.
- Well, Windows 98 finally launched this week, but did anyone really care? OK, that may be
a bit harsh, but apparently initial sales of the new operating system upgrade didn’t
exactly set any records. The only place where there was any sense of real excitement was
at all the CompUSA’s that sold 266 MHz Celeron-based computers for $98 to the first
10 customers in line—a promotion done in honor of the launch. I unfortunately missed
the launch event here in San Francisco, but it sounds like it was a fairly predictable
event. Numerous companies were demoing their products and Microsoft talked about how
Windows 98 is enabling a consumer revolution along the lines of the auto industry. Yawn.
- My personal experience with installing the final shipping code this past week was
decidedly mixed. I did a clean install on a separate hard drive partition to simulate what
it would be like to start from scratch with Windows 98 and was very surprised to discover
that it could not accurately recognize all my hardware, including a Matrox Millenium II
video card, Brother MFC printer/fax, and a Pacific ComWare TurboExpress 920 fast serial
port card. So, if you are planning to do an upgrade, make sure you have all the latest
drivers for your hardware, preferably on floppy disks, and get familiar with our old
friend the Device Manager—which is part of the System Control Panel. On the positive
side, Microsoft has incorporated a whole bunch of very powerful and very useful utilities
in Windows 98. The Microsoft System Information Tool, System Configuration Editor, System
File Checker, Version Conflict Manager, Automatic Skip Driver Agent, Dr. Watson and more
can be very handy when trying to troubleshoot common problems and avoid them in the first
place. In addition, the new Maintenance Wizard is handy for keeping your hard disk in
shape.
- More and more households are finding themselves with more than one computer and, as a
result, there’s been a growing interest in products designed specifically for home
networks. The beauty of a home network is that it allows you to share peripherals so that,
for example, you don’t have to buy multiple printers, scanners or even modems for
each computer. In addition, a home network can let you share a single Internet account,
which is going to be even more important as we start to get more widespread access to
high-speed Internet connections. The problem is, most end users don’t have the
foggiest idea of how to put together a simple network, and even if they do, the thought of
pulling wires through their walls (not to mention the costs) puts an immediate stop to the
process. As a result, several companies and industry organizations are working on
different initiatives and technologies that will allow people to easily put together
networks with what they’re calling "no new wires" or even no wires at all.
Specifically, there’s work being done to create simple networks using a home’s
existing power outlets and electrical wiring, the existing phone lines, and with simple
wireless connections. This past week, there were several interesting developments in that
regard, some of which Dr. ROM will be discussing in his segment later this hour. One
product that has just started shipping is the $249 Intelogis Passport system, which lets
you connect two Windows 95 or 98 PCs and one printer over your home’s electrical
lines. You can also add additional PCs and printers for $100 and $50 each, respectively.
The Intelogis network works at a rate of about 350 Kbps and use little adapter boxes that
plug into PC parallel ports and into your home’s power outlets to create a simple
peer-to-peer network. In addition, later this year, an organization called the Home
Phoneline Networking Alliance promises that you’ll be able to buy products that allow
you to use your phone lines in a very similar way. The phoneline-based system will also
cost approximately $100 per PC, but will offer transfer rates of about 1 Mbps initially,
with plans to move to standard 10 Mbps Ethernet rates in mid-1999. Finally, if you’re
more interested in wireless applications, the HomeRF Working Group is working on a
specification called SWAP, or Shared Wireless Access Protocol that can not only provide
simple wireless networks, but also tie in with cordless phones and other household
devices. In theory, for example, you could use a cordless phone from anywhere in your
house to control your PC via voice recognition. The good news is all of these
organizations are aware of each others’ efforts and are working to ensure that all
the various of home networking schemes are not only compatible, but can work together in a
mixed environment.
- PowerQuest just shipped a new Windows 95/98 utility program they’re calling
Guardian Angel, that combines the capabilities of an intelligent uninstaller program with
file and Internet security. Guardian Angel monitors system files and will warn you before
you install or download a file of any potential conflicts that the new application could
create. If a conflict does occur, the program lets you return to a previous state by
uninstalling the offending application(s). Guardian Angel also monitors and logs any
Internet activity, including what files, applets and cookies have been downloaded, and
offers security features that prevent unauthorized users from making changes to your
system. PowerQuest also announced the release of version 2.0 of DriveCopy, their utility
for easing the processing of moving all your files from one hard drive to another when you
upgrade to a bigger disk. The new version offers more flexible options including the
ability to copy drives with multiple partitions, or selectively copy only certain
partitions, etc.
- The latest entrant to the world of continuous speech recognition software is European
powerhouse Philips and their Windows-based product is called FreeSpeech 98. Retailing for
only $39, FreeSpeech 98 incorporates both speech recognition and command-and-control
features, which means you can use it to both dictate text into your computer as well as
control programs by simply speaking. It works with both Office 95 and Office 97, although
from some preliminary info I found on their web site, it looks like it has some problems
with Microsoft Intellimouse drivers. Like competitive products, you need a fairly powerful
computer to run FreeSpeech—at least a 166 MHz Pentium MMX with 32 MB for
Win95—and they recommend a 200 MHz MMX with 48 MB of RAM for optimal performance. You
can download a free trial of the software from the company’s website at
www.freespeech98.com.
- Everyone in the Internet industry is making lots of noise about being an Internet
portal, which is simply a starting point and home base through which these companies hope
lots of people will pass. Well, this week Disney made an effort to create an Internet
portal for kids with the launch of the Disney Internet Guide, or Dig. Dig is a
child-friendly and child-oriented search engine that looks an awful lot like Yahoo.
It’s got several main categories and then the rest of its fairly limited
content—at least at this point—is organized into subcategories below that. You
can get to the site from a link on my This Week’s Links page.
- Speaking of interesting sites, Microsoft unveiled the TerraServer this week, a site that
features aerial photographs of the Earth taken from space. Ironically, the site was put up
to demonstrate the technical prowess of the company’s SQL server database, but it
received so much web traffic that it was often inaccessible earlier in the week.
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