UTAH TECH WATCH - - by David Politis - - 1/13-15/96 Edition

Less than a year after purchasing the Politis Family PC, it was time to
upgrade the beast.

Knowing what software titles had made it onto the PCS at the office, the
idea last Spring of a home PC with a 420MB hard drive seemed like oodles
of space to me.

Boy, did I have a lot to learn.

Memory hogs

Turns out that my wife, unbeknownst to me at the time of our PC purchase,
is a "game-aholic."

Soon programs such as Under a Killing Moon, Myst, 7th Guest, and King's
Quest 5, 6 and 7 each ended up "loaded" onto our machine. And those were
just her games. And they each required a few megabytes of space on the
hard drive.

That doesn't count the several Clip Art programs she acquired to create
special cards, letters or appliques.

For the kids there were titles such as Oregon Trail, Read with Me/Write
with Me, Memphis Math, Grandma and Me, Aladdin, and others.

The bottom line is, by this Fall, we were running out of space on the hard
drive.

I had long ago given up any chance of any real time on the home PC, so I
had purchased a new laptop to truck around with me when work at home
beckoned. As a result, I knew the memory problems were not my fault.

Even after spending several days over the holidays deleting unwanted
programs and old "temporary" files (.tmp's), there still were only 10MB of
free space on the machine.

My adventurous wife

So it was last week that Allisha decided to purchase a new one gigabyte
hard drive.

She took the PC apart, determined if we had enough space for an additional
drive (not just a replacement one), and the type of connector required.

And she did it all.

She bought the hard drive off the shelf at a local computer store,
installed it and got the upgraded PC up and running again.

Unfortunately, it took three days to get all the kinks worked out.

More specifically, she spent several hours out of a three-day period on the
phone with the customer support departments of AT&T/GIS, Novell, and
Western Digital, as well as three configuration attempts, trying to figure
out why PerfectOffice was installing totally corrupted files and
directories.

Turns out the Photo CD screen saver that is installed at setup on our AT&T
machine was "doing its job" and looking for its CD in the CD-ROM drive
after several minutes of keyboard and mouse inactivity. Unfortunately, it
wasn't there but the PerfectOffice CD was, doing its job installing itself
on our new hard drive.

Obviously, there was a major conflict, which was simply remedied by
uninstalling the Photo CD screen saver.

And you know what? Allisha did it all herself.

Not because I made her, because I didn't. Not because I hate such stuff,
although I do.

She did it because she wanted to and because she figured that she could do
it. And she did.

Me, I would have paid the local retailer the extra $80 to have done it for
us. But that's me.

Home PC minimums

If you've got kids, or a lurking game-aholic, plan on using up a lot more
hard drive space than you would ever dream of if you are buying a new home
PC.

At a bare minimum, that means at least a one gigabyte (1GB) drive.

Next you'll want nothing slower than a 4X speed CD-ROM drive. They're so
plentiful today, they're almost standard.

As far as RAM is concerned, 16MB is the absolute minimum, particularly if
you're going to use Windows95. (My condolences, in advance if you are, but
that's another column.)

You'll also want a 15-inch, non-interlaced color monitor, which will cost a
bit more but will save your eyesight in the long run.

Assuming you'll want to surf the Internet, upgrade to a 28.8kbps modem if
it isn't standard on the PC you're considering.

And finally, don't buy anything slower than a 100MHz Pentium. Anything
less, and you won't be satisfied.

One last thing. Allisha says get a Canon Ink Jet color printer.

We've got the 600e and it prints everything from school reports and party
invitations to t-shirts and needlepoint patterns.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A marketing communications consultant that specializes in high-tech and
health care clients, David Politis welcomes column ideas at 801-569-2592
or via the Internet at dpolitis@altatech.com.
 
 =========================================================
 From the 'New Product News' Electronic News Service on...
 AOL (Keyword = New Products) and Delphi (GO COMP PROD)
 =========================================================
 This information was processed from data provided by the
 company/author mentioned. For additional details, please
 contact them directly at the address/phone# indicated.
 Trademarks are the property of their respective owners!
 =========================================================
 All submissions for this service should be addressed to:
 BAKER ENTERPRISES,  20 Ferro Dr,  Sewell, NJ  08080  USA
 Email:   rbakerpc@delphi.com   --or--   rbakerpc@aol.com
 =========================================================
