Rich's Ramblings

By Rich Schinnell



Back in November 2002, I attended the Association of PC User Group's (APCUG) annual meeting in Las Vegas which is always held during the Fall COMDEX ( COmputer DEalers eXposition) . In the past COMDEX has gotten much too big to be able to see it all, but after 9/11, as with all such events, companies have been downsizing. This year's COMDEX was no exception. There weren't as many vendors or attendees, which made it easier to get around and see what you were looking for. Some of the old-timers were not exhibiting but there was plenty to see.



There were several events during the APCUG week-long conference where different vendors splurged for a meal while giving myself and 350 other user group leaders product and technical presentations. I enjoyed a presentation by Pat Gelsinger Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Intel corporation. Mr Gelsinger demonstrated some of their new products and talked about Intel's future plans for almost two hours and no one got up to leave, as it was so interesting. As an added benefit of my user group magazine writings and lots of volunteering for CPCUG (Capital PC User Group) and APCUG, I was invited to be a member of Intel's User Group advisory team. There were 15 of us chosen to participate, from novice computer types (but dedicated User Groupies) to some of the more technology (Nerdies and Nerdettes) types.

Big Pleasant Surprise: After getting back to my home in Rockville, Maryland, I received an email from Bryan Deaner, the Intel representative, saying they had a surprise for the members of the advisory team. They were going to send each of us a new computer with their latest and greatest 3 GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading technology (Non-Geek translation: That really means that some of the more advanced software thinks it is two CPUs working at the same time). We all received a Gateway series huge tower with 500 Megabytes of RAM, the latest in high end Nvidia graphics board and of course Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor. And a Huge! 22" Mitsubishi flat screen monitor (No, not an LCD, but I can wish).

This was a real screaming computer, 80 GB of hard disk and a great audio system with humongous speakers. I thought that this was a really high power machine that any Gamer or Graphics person would kill for. I was right, I had to pry it out of the hands of a friend of mine who borrowed it for a week to test a few games. He showed me the game Unreal Tournament 2003 running on the machine and even I was impressed, as I am not really a gamer. I then went to www.pcpitsop.com to test it out and was I amazed at the performance figure of 1530, which by the way means that there aren't many more powerful desktop computers around. Outside of what some of the Over clockers do to processor chips, this is a fast bunny out of the box. Just for reference, my PIII 1.08 laptop shows up as a 647. But your mileage may vary.



This Gateway is so easy to open and change components that I figured that I would spice it up a bit with one of the new Adaptec SCSI controllers and a faster hard disk. The controller is an Adaptec SCSI Raid 39320-R PCI/PCIX board, so when PCIX comes out, I will be ready. (PCIX is a new Extended PCI type slot that will eventually be available on motherboards, hopefully for desktops) I shopped all over the web for a good sized 15K RPM SCSI hard disk but no vendor had one in stock. I finally settled on a Seagate ST336607LW 40GB at 10K RPM, which is still pretty fast.



If you're into graphics or games, the Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 and the Creative SB Audigy will knock your socks off. The Pentium 4 3.06GHZ with Hyper-Threading technology seems to fit the bill for speed and the old feeling "Mine is bigger'n yours" syndrome that many of us old timers subscribe to. Especially back in the days of yore where 4 MB of RAM cost $200-400. I added an additional 500MB of RAM to bring it up to a full Gigabyte and it cost me less than $200. If you're into graphic manipulation, then this is the processor for you as attested to by friends who are graphics people.

On top of all this, In March of 2003, Intel sent out a message to all the user group leaders who attended the APCUG fall event in Las Vegas, offering each person a P4 3.06 and a motherboard for a huge discount. Being the techy that I am. I took them up on their offer so that I could build a machine for a good friend. (Just so you don't call me to get one for you, each attendee was only allowed to purchase one at the 60% off rate.) The going rate on www.pricewatch.com for the set was over $550 (as of 3/29/03) and around $410 on 7/8/2003. Intel offered them to attendees of the APCUG conference for $250. With 2nd day air and tax, it came to $275 which is a great deal in my book. Maybe you might want to attend the APCUG conference this year in Las Vegas, check out www.apcug.org for information. CPCUG is a member of APCUG.

For more information on Intel Hyper-Threading technology, you can visit their web pages at www.intel.com and follow pointers to P4 and Hyper-Threading. And of course Intel now has a Newer, Faster and Better version of the 3.0GHz P4 chip. Intel also added Hyper-Threading technology to some of it's slower Pentium 4 chips and announced a 3.2GHz P4 with Hyper-Threading technology. (As of July 8, 2003)

Rich Schinnell is semi-retired from CPCUG after volunteering for over 20 years. He has assisted with the APCUG fall conferences in various capacities for over 15 years. Rich retired from the USN and Vitro Corporation and still does a bit of small business consulting on interesting projects. He volunteers at the Centers for the Handicapped (www.chicenters.org), helping them with their computer systems. Rich can be contacted via email at schinnel@cpcug.org or via phone at (301) 949-9292 for comments on his articles. His web page is at www.schinnell.org where he has many of his past "Rich's Ramblings" articles for review. While his four computers at home are not busy, they all run the seti@home software helping out in the search for communications from space. (Check it out at www.seti.org/science/setiathome.html.)