Hewie's Views and Reviews
By Hewie Poplock

Welcome to this issue of Hewie's Views & Reviews. Be sure to visit Hewie's Favorites at http://www.hewie.net/ . Hewie's Quick Thoughts appear almost daily at http://www.hewie.net/weblog/ .

In this issue:

++++ Past newsletters on line
++++ Laptop Upgrade
++++ Desktop Upgrade
++++ Speed Improved
++++ New additions to Hewie's Favorites

May, 2004

++++ Past newsletters on line
I have been somewhat remiss in sending out my monthly columns to the newsletter list. The articles have been written and published in print, but not emailed. To catch-up with any of the past Hewie's Views and Reviews, visit the archive on line at http://www.hewie.net/views/archive.html The most recent issue is available on line at http://www.hewie.net/views/current.html .

++++ Laptop Upgrade

This month I am focusing on hardware. I had 2 hard drive crashes in the past few months. One was caused by a physical drive failure. The second was caused by me, but I haven't determined how I did it. Thanks to good back ups, I lost very little work.

After attending my local computer user group meeting http://www.cfcs.org and seeing a demonstration of the new Intel Centrino chips, I began to look for a new laptop computer. I settled on an Averatec 5110H with the Centrino chips. Out of the box, it had 512MB Ram, a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, 3 USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire (IEEE 1394) port, a 10/100 network port, a 56k modem, and an on-board wireless network connection. It also sports a DVD Reader, CD-RW drive, but no floppy drive. I purchased it at one of the local office supply stores. I have been watching prices on the several discount-listing sites and found this great bargain. It had an instant $450 off of a $1399 price, plus a $100 mail-in rebate, which I received within a month of purchase. So the bottom line was $850.

I will discuss the networking with this laptop in the next issue. Now I have a laptop with more horsepower than my desktop, which supports an AMD 1 Ghz chip. Since I made the choice of upgrading to a new laptop, I fully expected to wait quite a while to upgrade my desktop.

++++ Desktop Upgrade

I attended the Florida Association of Computer User Group http://www.facug.org annual spring conference in March. I was elected Vice-President. One of the meals was sponsored by Intel and they generously gave away a 3.06Ghz Pentium 4 CPU with Hyper-Threading boxed with a fan and an Intel Motherboard to support the CPU. I was the lucky ticket holder! So now, with the major components for a new super-speed system, I now was "forced" into building a new desktop computer. I decided to go with a good case with plenty of fans, a DVD writer, and a Gigabyte of memory.

++++ Speed Improved

I have been kept busy installing software on the new system. Wow! It is amazingly fast. I am doing video capturing and editing for classes that I teach. What would take enough time for me to make and have dinner, now takes just a couple of minutes. Of course much of the Internet speed is at the mercy of the internet and the websites, so that has not changed. However, opening new windows and general system start-up really flies.

The DVD writer uses both the plus and minus standards. I was able to get a drive for under $100 and the disks save 4.7 Gigabytes of data. That is about 7 CD-R disks. I was able to save almost all of my important data on one disk, and quite fast as well.

I now have lots of items to review and report to you and will do so in the next few issues. There are not many new sites listed this month, so take a look an any page at Hewie's Favorites and re-visit many of the sites.