Another year has come and gone! I have had a really great time helping all the many clients in the local area who called on me this past year. For a semi-retired guy, I sure was busy!
There have been some changes in PCs over the past year - let's review: The PC business had a major downturn towards the end of 2002 and early 2003. A number of vendors left the business, but new ones took their places. Processor speeds increased quite a bit, and prices dropped. You can now get perfectly good PCs at local vendors such as Wal-Mart. As I have mentioned previously, the service at these places may be suspect, but the quality of the PCs they sell seem to be quite OK.
One of the biggest changes this past year is the acceptance, in effect, of a DVD recording standard. There were two competing DVD recording standards, and that was holding back the industry because people didn't know which to buy for the long term. It was just like VHS vs. BetaMax. But the hardware DVD drive vendors took the bull by the horns and came out with drives that supported both standards. Drive prices also dropped well below $200. Its now fairly common for people to connect their camcorders to their PC using a FireWire interface, to edit the video, and write fairly fancy DVDs with introductions, music, and fancy special effects. I actually just got a DVD writer myself, and am looking forward to using it.
Another hardware standard that is emerging is the thumb-sized USB attached memory device. You can get them in up to 256MB in size, and they make a very convenient way to backup or transfer data. Most people don't have more than that much data to back up, and you can carry it with you when you leave the house. Windows XP supports these devices natively (i.e. no driver needed). Goodbye floppy diskette.
AMD introduced a 64-bit CPU. In the future they will all be 64-bit, but for now it makes little difference to the average person. But it's interesting that the first vendor out the door with a 64-bit chip was AMD and not Intel.
As I have commented on recently, there really isn't much new on the software end of the business. I upgraded a lot of my software this year, but the upgrades barely give me more function or reliability than the previous version. Microsoft keeps patching Windows, but has apparently given up patching the Windows 98 product line (including ME). But I can't blame them for dropping support on such an old OS.
So, what does 2004 hold in store? You will see some processor speed increases, but percentage-wise, not a major change. What you will see is more multi-processor configurations in high-end PCs. RAM prices will remain about the same. Serial hard drives will replace the older parallel cabling, and more motherboards will support RAID configurations. RAID allows you to logically combine two hard drives to appear as either a faster one, or a redundant one.
Photo ink-jet printers will continue to improve. Color laser printers will still not make an inroad into the market - they will still be too expensive and not have the quality for photo printing.
Software - booorrrring! Somebody has to come out with a killer ap to revive the industry - please!
Internet: nothing new here. Email - ditto. But there will be more and more popups, spam, and privacy intrusions. We haven't even seen the worst of that yet, by far.
By the way, I did buy a new PC this month. As most of you know, I can assemble my own PC from parts, and will continually upgrade my PC over its life. But every once-in-a-while it's time to start again. I order from what is called a third-tier vendor, as their prices are about as inexpensive as I could get buying the parts myself, but they assemble and test it for me.
I ordered a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of high speed RAM, an ASUS motherboard, and two Seagate serial ATA drives in a RAID 0 (striping) configuration. The motherboard supports Gigabit Ethernet (not that I plan to use it) and 6.1 channel sound (which I do plan to use). I ordered a middle-of-the-road video card (ATI 9600) - I just couldn't see spending $400 or more on a video card just to play games a bit better. I can't wait until the UPS truck shows up!
Well, thank you to all my faithful readers and clients over the past year. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and extend my best wishes for the New Year. Oh and, don't forget to treat yourself and buy that new computer toy!
Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his web site at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.