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November 7, 1998
News
- I had a very interesting week this past week and got a chance
to delve even further into the Year 2000, or Y2K problem as a result of attending both the
Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose and sitting on a Y2K roundtable at a financial
firm’s day-long conference. Interestingly, the more I’m learning, the more
confident I’m feeling that it will not be a big problem.
- In case you’re still worried that it is, however,
Symantec’s Norton Utilities group has now released Norton 2000, a Windows 95/98/NT
utility that’s designed to look specifically for Y2K problems on your PC and help you
fix them. The $49 package includes a BIOS/Real-time Clock test on a floppy that you can
use to check your system BIOS’ ability to handle the year 2000 and, more importantly,
a driver that will help your system get past the millenium rollover even if you can’t
get your BIOS updated. In addition, Norton 2000 has a handy function that can scan through
spreadsheets and databases looking for potential date problems in formulas and data.
Frankly, it’s these types of problems that will probably cause more troubles for
stand-alone PCs or those in small business networks than any of the BIOS
issues—although I think even these problems have been over-rated. Finally, the
program also has a database of known Y2K problems with applications and it can scan your
system looking for potentially problematic applications and then automatically download
any available patches that might be able to fix those problems.
- Speaking of Y2K problems and how to fix them, IBM recently
unveiled a comprehensive Y2K information site that walks you through the process of
checking your PC for Year 2000 compatibility. The site even includes information on all
the company’s PC models going back to the original IBM PC and tells what you can do
to make your system ready for the year 2000. You can find IBM’s Year 2000 Road Map
linked from my This Week’s Links page.
- Speaking of year 2000-related stuff, Microsoft announced this
week that the next upgrade to their immensely popular Office suite of products—Office
2000—will now be delayed until the second quarter of 1999.
- One piece of Microsoft software that is still on track,
however, is version of 5.0 of their Internet Explorer browser. Yes, the beta version of IE
5.0 is now available for the public to download and try. Most of the changes in IE 5.0 are
under the hood, so if you do download and try it, you probably won’t notice much of a
difference over 4.0. Behind the scenes, however, IE 5.0 has better support for web
standards such as Cascading Style Sheets and other advanced HTML functions, as well as
extensive support for XML. The few differences you will notice are focused primarily on
the Search, Favorites and History functions. In the Search, for example, you can tell the
Search Engine you choose what type of information you’re looking for, or you can
search several search engines at once. The Favorites area lets you more easily organize
large lists of favorite web sites and the History function in 5.0 offers several ways to
view the order of the sites you visited. Nice little touches all, but not exactly anything
revolutionary. Similarly, the more extensive AutoComplete and AutoCorrect features that
5.0 has might be handy, but I don’t think they’re going to help you choose
between sticking with Explorer or trying Netscape’s Navigator/Communicator.
- In an attempt to show that Apple isn’t the only company
that can produce interesting-looking PCs, Intel this week unveiled some "Concept
PCs" that it apparently hopes will spur PC makers to come up with more interesting
computer designs. Though they aren’t real products in the sense that you can go out
and buy them, they are based on real technologies—many of which, in fact, are quite
similar to what’s in the iMac. Most of the designs, for example, did not include a
floppy, but did have USB and IEEE 1394 ports. In addition, these concept PCs lacked the
standard serial and parallel ports found on virtually all PCs—in fact, they also
didn’t have any ISA slots. Look for PC companies to come up with some more creative
designs that do take advantage of these new technologies and do not include the older
technologies, sometime in 1999.
- Speaking of the iMac, Apple got a lot of press this week for
a new iMac financing program that lets you buy an iMac for only $30 a month. The idea, of
course, is to spur sales of the machine to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
Unfortunately, at the 14.5% interest rate they’re charging, it takes about six years
to pay off the machine—a near eternity in the computer market. The more important
iMac news is that a new rev B version of the devices are shipping with a faster ATI Rage
Pro 3D graphics chip and 6 MB of video RAM as standard (original machines only had 2 MB).
In addition, all iMacs are now shipping with MacOS 8.5.
- The big news in the removable storage world this past week
was that Syquest filed Chapter 11 and went out of business. Apparently many industry
analysts were not surprised, but I’m sure some Syquest customers were. My
recommendation if you own a Syquest drive of some kind? Go out and buy lots of cartridges
real soon….
- Lots of notebooks were in the news again this week. NEC, for
example, introduced a new low-cost addition to their Versa line of products. The VersaNote
starts at $1,799 for a system with a 233 MHz Pentium II and a 12.1" active matrix
screen. In addition, the Versa Note includes a 3.2 GB hard drive, 24x CD-ROM and a floppy,
all of which are available simultaneously. In addition, the Versa Note comes with a
built-in V.90 internal modem, which should make the machine even more handy.
- IBM unveiled the ThinkPad 390 series of machines, which is
scheduled to replace their current low-end 380 business line. The 390s, which start at
around $1,700, include a 233 MHz Pentium MMX (but not PII) processor, 12.1" active
matrix screen, 32 MB of RAM, 3.2 GB hard drive a 24x CD-ROM drive and a V.90 56K modem.
- In other notebook-related news, both Compaq and Toshiba cut
the prices on some of their business-oriented notebook lines. Compaq, for example, dropped
the price of their ultraslim Armada 6500 from $4,999 to $4,199—a change for the
better of 16%. Similarly, Toshiba’s Tecra 780CDM, which features a 266 MHz Pentium II
and a 13.3" screen was slashed 32% from $3,999 to $2,699.
- MicroCenter has unveiled a new $399 PC system (without
monitor), based around the 233 MHz Cyrix MediaGX chip. The PowerSpec 2021 system also
includes 32 MB of RAM, 2.1 GB hard drive, 24x CD-ROM, and a 33.6K modem, all for under
$400. It’s bundled with Windows 98, Microsoft Works integrated software, and more.
- Finally, Evergreen Technologies has announced a clever new
upgrade for speeding up older PCs. The EclipsePCI is a PCI add-in card that can host a
processor, memory and chipset, which means you can do things like add support for Pentium
IIs, AMD K6-2’s and 100 MHz system buses to Pentiums, Pentium Pros and even some
late-model 486s. The card doesn’t require any drivers, nor the removal or exchange of
your system’s existing processor or memory. Instead, it simply plugs into a standard
PCI slot on your computer and then "takes over" the machine as soon as it boots.
The card—which won’t be readily available until the first quarter of
1999—will be available by itself for around $200 and Evergreen estimates that a card
with a 300 MHz Celeron processor and 64 MBs of memory will run about $400.
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