COLUMN: Power Fever Strikes - Beware

keeping up with computer technology can help you get your money's worth when upgrading. They call it upgrade fever. Not unlike middle-aged men buying red Ferrari's, people who buy computers want more power, more speed, more storage space, and more bells and whistles (or 32-bit wavetable FM synthesis of bells and whistles, as the case may be) on their computers than they know what to do with. Not that power is bad, mind you. It's just that every six months we feel this intense need to scrap everything we have and start over. Maybe you feel this description doesn't apply to you. Maybe you've been working on a Mac Classic II you've had since high school, or (god forbid) use a dedicated word processor. If you don't fit the category yourself, think of your friend who just got a new Gateway. You know, the Pentium 166 with 32 meg of EDO RAM. Not that this friend has even the slightest idea what EDO RAM is, much less how to use the system to its fullest. Other people you know probably have quad speed, three disc changers from Dell -- which they use to play Allanis CDs -- or laptops with TFT active-matrix color screens to Doom. I, myself, after upgrading at Christmas to a NexGen Nx586 90MHz VLB motherboard, have now decided I need a Cyrix 6x86-P120+ PCI motherboard. This means scrapping my video card and SCSI controller, but it's all the name of progress, right? And what prompted my decision to upgrade? The fact that I can't run Quake. Not exactly a scholarly pursuit. Now, I'll probably be able to assuage some of the cost of a new motherboard and video card by selling off my old equipment at discounted prices to people even further behind me on the technology curve. By now you've figured out why people scrap their whole system every year and buy a new one. What's the difference between PCI and VLB? Why won't my old stuff work? Who cares about the nuances that make up the difference between a Cyrix P166+ and Pentium Pro 200? What you want to do is call up Micron and ask for a good system that fits in your budget. Allocate two grand, and any salesperson will tell the best and newest thing you can get with your money. They'll spare you the grief of deciding whether or not it's worth it to plunk down an extra $50 to get pipeline burst cache. No need to ask whether or not the Diamond Stealth 64 will give you better performance than the Imagine #9 128. They'll box up a system that works and ship it to you. For those who want to avoid the mess entirely, there's Macintosh. Since Apple trimmed down their bloated catalog of system types, choosing a Mac is a no-brainer based on how much money you have. No debating between SCSI and IDE; SCSI is all you get. Wait for USB? Why bother; ADB is already there and working, and has been for years. There's one problem with this approach, aside from the extra costs. Knowing what your system contains, how it works, and what it does for you not only ensures that you'll get what you paid for -- it allows you to prolong the life of your system. If I had opted for a PCI motherboard eight months ago, I wouldn't be spending so much now. In addition to understanding the myriad TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) of the computer industry, understanding what you need your computer to do is essential. If Word and Excel is all you need, there's no reason to get a Pentium 166. If you plan to play lots of games, trade off processor performance and harddrive space for a speedy graphics adapter and a good sound card. Four years and I've gone through at least two complete systems one piece at a time. Now a whole wave of developments are on the horizon that will probably prompt me to buy a complete system when I graduate in December. ATX motherboards will force me to get a new case, USB will require all new peripherals (keyboard, mouse, joystick, printer, even modem), DVD will replace CD-ROM, and SDRAM will usurp EDO RAM. How can anyone keep up with all this? Actually, it's not that hard once you know the basic stuff. After knowing what RAM is, the difference between DRAM, EDO RAM, SDRAM, VRAM, SRAM, and WRAM become nonessential; they're all just variations on a theme, each slightly different, and sometimes better at different tasks. The same holds true for modem, where speed is the only consideration, and video cards, where other factors come into play. Buses, CPUs, clock speeds, etc. all seem complicated, but again the essentials haven't changed in literally 15 years. The ISA bus debate has decisively ended with PCI, and the only remaining competitor is several years from implementation. Except for the Pentium Pro, the higher the clock rate the faster the machine goes. And the CPUs from Cyrix and AMD are virtually indistinguishable from Intel's chips to the end user. Find out what you've got under the hood. Figure out what simple and inexpensive things can be done to tweak system performance. Decide whether or not you really need a new machine, or what you want out of one if you're buying for the first time. Doing so puts power in your hands, and will give you more bang for your buck. Whatever you do, don't just by the fastest, most expensive thing your friends or sales rep recommends, and don't feel your system is useless because it's outdated. Take control of your system, and run it instead of letting it run you.

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