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April 24, 1999
News
- You can now pre-order copies of my upcoming book "Personal Computer Secrets"
online on my web site at www.everythingcomputers.com. The order form is available through
a secure web connection, so you can feel comfortable placing your credit card order there.
The book will be available for shipping at the end of May, and all pre-orders will be
filled at that time. No credit cards will be charged until the book is shipped. I’m
selling copies that I will personally sign for $39.95, which is 20% off the suggested
retail price—and the same price you’ll pay for an unsigned copy from Amazon.com
and other big book sites. By the way, that price also includes a CD-ROM with an
electronically searchable version of the book, as well as host of great shareware,
freeware and product demos.
- The CIH virus—which can wipe out your hard drive and even rewrite your PC’s
BIOS—is set to strike this Monday, April 26. The CIH virus is relatively rare and can
only be spread by downloading and installing an infected application, but its potential
impact is too important to be ignored. Some versions of the various are supposed to take
effect on the 26th of every month, but the most well-known version strikes just
once a year on April 26. Any up-to-date anti-virus application should be able to both find
and eradicate CIH, but thankfully, even if you don’t have any anti-virus software,
several companies are offering free utilities you can download. I have a link on my This
Week’s Links page to a free utility called KillCIH from Symantec. Just download,
install it and run and you can be sure your system will be safe.
- A while back, Hewlett-Packard announced a new line of low-cost printers that were going
to be introduced under the Apollo name. Well, the first fruits of their efforts are now
available. The $79 Apollo 1200 printer—which is available either in cool mist or
lunar blue—is a 600 dpi color inkjet printer that comes standard with a 3-color ink
cartridge. The attractive looking printers look like they might mate up nicely with an
iMac, but unfortunately they only come with a parallel port and so can only be used with
PCs. The 1200 offers print speeds of up to 1.5 ppm in color draft mode and 3.5 ppm in
black-and-white draft mode. To print black-only documents, however, you’ll have to
pop for an optional black ink cartridge. Unfortunately, you can’t have both a black
and color cartridge in the printer at the same time. Still, if you’re looking for a
low-cost printer to go with your low-cost PC, or if you need a second printer for home,
it’s certainly worth a look.
- Look for new Intel Celeron-based computers to be available this Monday, or maybe even
tomorrow. The company is expected to introduce the 466 MHz version of their low-cost chip
in their ongoing battle AMD’s K6 and Cyrix’s MII line of processors. The 466 MHz
version of the Celeron doesn’t offer any real breakthroughs versus previous
versions—other than being faster, of course—but it does still include 128 KB of
onboard L2 cache, which gives the chip very good performance. On Monday Intel is also
expected to unveil a new chipset. Code-named Whitney, the new 810 chipset that Intel is
also expected to unveil on Monday has a couple of interesting changes. Most importantly,
the 810 is the first Intel chipset to integrate a graphics accelerator. What that means
is, it will allow companies to build computers that don’t have a separate video card,
but instead use the video capabilities of the 810. This, in turn, should to lead to even
lower-cost computers. The graphics capabilities of the 810 chipset are no slouch
either—it’s basically the equivalent of Intel’s i740 3D graphics
accelerator chip, which can still be found on some stand-alone graphics cards. The 810 and
computers based around are not expected to be available right away, but start looking for
them in small quantities next month and in volume in June.
- Microsoft announced some bug fixes and security hole patches for their Internet Explorer
4.0 and 5.0 browsers. The problems have to do with obscure issues whereby web sites could
conceivably find out information about the files stored on your hard disk if you visited
them. You can find a link to the free downloads from my This Week's Links page.
- Apple officially unveiled QuickTime 4.0, the latest version of their media architecture
for both Macs and PCs. The new version includes a greatly enhanced player that has a more
complete set of controls, a slicker interface, and support for many more file formats. In
addition, its new plug-in architecture lets you easily add new formats as they become
available. Right now the QuickTime player includes support for MP3 audio, Macromedia Flash
animations, as well as lots of common graphics formats, including Photoshop files and
more. The new version also includes better support for the QuickTime VR interactive
virtual reality format that lets you move around a picture.
- How would you like to surf the Web on your PC with just your voice? If the idea sounds
appealing, you may want to check out the version 3.0 of the $59 Conversa Web program, from
Conversa. The program allows you to simply say common commands and have the included web
browser react accordingly. New to this version is the ability to spell out URLs with a
military alphabet, use voice commands to visit sites in the History list, auto-complete of
long URL addresses and more.
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