As I wrote in an earlier column, I recently bought a new PC. I don’t usually buy from the major (tier 1 or 2) manufacturers, but rather I find a tier 3 vendor who will assemble the parts that I want. I could just buy the parts outright and assemble them myself, but I have found that there is some aggravation doing that (dealing with different parts vendors, not having everything arrive on time, cost of shipping different parcels, etc.) and that are places who will give me almost as good prices on the parts and assemble them for me. I did research the individual parts, and placed the order.
The major difference in buying a computer from a tier 3 vendor like that is that you had better be sure that the components you want work together and do what you want. That is not to say that the tier 1 vendors do an outstanding job of that either, but they are certainly better. So, not being totally naive, I was prepared for something not to work right. So far, I have found two somethings, and this is the story.
I ordered two CD-ROM/DVD devices. The first was a Plextor CD writer. This device was very highly rated (in fact, it was a product-of-the-year). The other drive was a Pioneer DVD-ROM. I also ordered a sound card capable of 5.1 Dolby sound and a 6 channel speaker system. The intent was to be able to view DVDs on my computer. Why, you may ask? My wife and I have very different tastes in movies so I have to play those Star Trek movies in private!
The DVD player and associated software seemed to play well. The on-screen image was excellent, and I could resize the viewing window to any size I wanted. This let me watch Star Trek movies along with having my word processor open to write columns. But I noticed that the center channel speaker was silent.
I ran the sound system diagnostics and the center channel speaker played fine. At this point, the phone calls and e-mails to the sound card and DVD manufacturers started. I won’t bore you with the details here, but the bottom line is that the sound card manufacturer does have drivers for the Windows 2000 Professional operating system that I have on the new computer. What they didn’t bother to mention is that those drivers have some limitations under Win2K, specifically that the AC3 decoder (which handles 5.1 sound) isn't functional yet. When will it be available? Stay tuned…
I then found out that the DVD player software that came with the video card in the computer also does not support AC3. Now, in this case, I can use different software. I downloaded a trial version of a popular one and the installation was so bad that I had to remove it before even getting a chance to test the AC3 capability.
Along with this problem, I found a related problem. My new high speed CD writer wasn't writing at a very high speed at all. Looking through the hardware configuration, I saw that the CD writer was running in slower PIO mode rather than DMA mode. After much experimentation (which included taking the computer apart, removing all the drives and changing their cabling and settings) I found that the CD writer needed to be configured as the master device on the IDE channel. The computer vendor had the CD writer as the slave and the DVD drive as the master.
I was able to re-cable the drives and now the CD writer is in DMA mode, and the DVD still works properly as slave. (I realize this is a lot of techie stuff – sorry about that!)
Anyhow, the bottom line here is that even your experienced computer consultant here can still run afoul of the computer configuration blues. The CD writer now works fine, and I can watch my DVD movies, but the sound is not as good as I wanted.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).