In computer news this week:

Lead: Buying that Christmas computer - don't buy pig iron!

The old country bluesman Leadbelly didn't know much about computers - but he did know pig iron when he saw it in his song The Rock Island Line :

I got pig iron, I got all pig iron

Down the Rock Island Line, she's a mighty good road

Rock Island Line it's the road to ride

Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line

Today you can buy a complete Dell computer online for $ 449, with a fast Pentium processor, 128 Mb of ram, 40 gig hard disk, cd burner, mouse, speakers, windows and a monitor.

Most computers today have more entertainment features and software than business software, and a mistake many buyers make is buying a big hunk of pig iron - a powerful computer without powerful software. They buy a computer with an operating system, and entertainment software, but no application - or business software.

This particular Dell computer comes with Windows XP home edition; an operating system. It comes with several entertainment programs. Real player - so you can play music and videos. The Dell jukebox so you can play more music. The Dell picture studio so you can make pretty pictures. A free 6 month subscription to either AOL or Earthlink so you can surf the internet.

This is all fun and games software - you can't do much serious business with it.

Fortunately this Dell comes with Word Perfect - a word processing program - and Microsoft money - so you can do your accounting.

Now if we go over to the Gateway website, we see that they have what looks like a similar system in specs for $ 549, which comes with Microsoft works - a bundled elementary software program that includes a very basic word processor, spreadsheet, and a database program. It also includes the Norton antivirus program 90 day free trial, which means you would have to buy it if you really want it.

The biggest problem with this Gateway computer is that it would just be another big piece of pig iron sitting on your desk. You could brag to your friends that it has a Celeron processor 2.4 Gigahertz with 128K cache, and even has a 64 megabyte dynamic video memory card,

You see, this $ 549 price doesn't include a monitor, which as we all know is a very useful thing to have with a computer. So if we add their cheapest monitor to this computer, so we can see what we're doing - then the price goes up to & 768 - or $ 319 more than the Dell system.

So going back to the Dell website, if we would want to do really serious business on this computer - we could add on Microsoft Office Professional for around $ 460 - a lot more money - but this includes:

Access - a powerful database program

Excel - a spreadsheet program for financial forecasting

Outlook with Business Contact Manager - for contact management and your business calendar and todo lists

Powerpoint - for desktop or web presentations

Publisher - for Desktop publishing of virtually anything

Word - the industry standard word processing program.

This would give you a very powerful computer - with very powerful software - still for well under $ 1000.

Or you could try some of the programs in Open Office - http://www.openoffice.org/ which I talked about earlier this year - similar programs for free.

Or you could just buy a big piece of pig iron.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230