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What's new in computers? What's coming up? What to watch out for. Monitors Digital monitors (LCD) are just now becoming affordable. Look for the 15" Flat Panel monitors to be sub $500 in 2001. The 15" size is equivalent to the 17" monitor, but the picture is much better, expecially in bright lights. And with a base size of only 8x15, it certainly increases the desktop space. USB We have been quite pleasantly surprised with the lack of problems with the Universal Serial Bus. Our experience has been very good. All of our systems include 2 USB ports, and there are now many USB devices available on the market, from network devices to cameras and scanners. What is it? On the surface, it's a great idea. PC's were saddled with the old architecture and OS restrictions on resources, more commonly known as IRQ's. This restriction limit the number of devices that can be attached to the system. Generally this limited the system to 15 devices. (For the technical inclined reading this, please keep in mind that this is a plain english translation of the issues) USB is supposed to expand the number of devices to 128. For example, you'll plug the monitor into one system USB port and the keyboard into the second system USB port. The mouse, speakers, joystick, scanners, external data storage devices (ZIP Drives, etc.) plugs into an open USB port on the monitor or keyboard. Then everyone will live happily ever after in that wonderful world of adequate resources. So far, it's worked out very well. CPU's Four years ago, the hot CPU was the Pentium 90, and carried a price tag commensurate with it's lofty status. Today, it's slow, clunky and obsolete. The Pentium 4 with a 1.5 G speed is now on the market. It's still quite pricey. Plus Intel, in it's infinite wisdom, will complicate things by releasing lower cost variants of each CPU with certain features disabled. Which will endlessly complicate buying a computer system. Remember, keep you eye on the shell and keep track of which one has the pea under it! Seriously, this processor, coupled with the 400 Mhz front side bus should be a real screamer. Watch for the Pentium 4 to hit the mainstream in mid 2001. The year 2001 will probably witness the debut of CPU's in the 2-3 G range. Why would I need that speed, you ask? Keep in mind the past history of computers and let that be your guide to predicting the future. When INTEL develops a faster CPU, programmers develop more complex programs because....well, the new CPU can run it. But this means larger programs. So the hard drive folks step in and develop larger hard drives to store the larger programs that the new and faster CPU's can run. Running today's programs on a 1000Mhz machine would be described as total overkill. Could you tell the difference between .01 second and .001 second? Didn't think so. But it will make a difference on the programs released subsequent to the introduction of the faster CPU's. HARD DRIVES Western Digital recently announced development of a technology to increase data density on hard drives by a factor of 100. But we won't be looking for this for about 3-5 years. Imagine, 400-500 gigabyte hard drives. Makes today's hard drives look puny by comparison. Just remember, six years ago the standard hard drive in most systems was in the 350MB range. Our standard hard drive is now 20 G and climbing. We expect to see the standard hard drive size in the 50 MB range in 2001. And now we have IEEE 1384 standard coming out. 400mbps data transfer rates over a four conductor cable. Watch for this soon. |
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