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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week
Thursday December 16, 2004 |
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Buying that Christmas computer
– have prices ever plummeted.... It seems
like just a couple years ago the major PC makers were talking about the
thousand dollar price ceiling – the vendors wanted prices to stay at
this point but the buying public wanted cheaper computers. Things
have really changed in the past couple years. 2 of the major players, Gateway
and IBM, are now virtually out of the game, with Gateway now emphasizing home
electronics, and IBM recently selling its PC business to a Chinese company. That leaves Dell
computers at the top of the hill in the direct market channel, followed by
Hewlett Packard. Today not
only are prices under the thousand dollar price ceiling, but you can buy a
complete computer system and printer online for almost half that cost. Dell is
offering a Pentium 4 system with a flat screen monitor, 40 gig hard disk, 256
Megs of ram, and a free printer with free shipping for $ 539. This
would be an adequate system for either home or office, but you really would
want to bump the ram up to 512 megs and get the dual drive writable cdrom and dvd system, which
brings the price up to $ 670.
Still a great value. Remember that new pc’s today don’t
come with a floppy disk drive, so you probably want to buy one of the USB
Flash drives
that are now available for well under $ 50 for copying and
backing up files. This
would take of your hardware and printing needs, but remember a computer is
just a hunk of pig iron without the software to make it actually do
something. So you can buy Microsoft Office Basic for $ 134 which includes
Word, Excel, and Outlook, and there you have the major software tools
you’ll need. A complete powerful usable system – delivered to
your door, for about $ 800. But on
your software there is another route many users are choosing to explore. I
recently did a review of the new free Firefox web
browser which is based on the open office concept; free programs compatible
with other major commercial suites such as Microsoft Office. Open source code
available to anyone, anyone can use these programs without paying for them. The Firefox browser http://www.mozilla.org/
has become so incredibly popular that I was listening to a story on NPR this
week about how users loved it so much – they donated money to place a full page ad
for it in the New York Times! An
estimated 3.5 million users downloaded it in the first week it was available,
and it has been hailed as a superior browser by major pc magazines and
newspapers. I
switched to it
recently, and now when I now receive an email from Microsoft
informing me that still another security hole has been discovered in Internet
Explorer and needs patching, I just laugh and delete it. Been there –
done that ... You can
download the free suite of Open office programs at http://www.openoffice.org/ which
includes a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing programs, and database tools.
Certainly
something worth looking at considering the high price of some software today. I hope
Santa leaves you that one computer toy you’ve been hoping for. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2004 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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