My first PC was an Apple II. I was (still am!) a geeky engineer that was fascinated that I could have a computer in my house. I already could program (Fortran, Cobal and Basic) so getting a computer that I could train to do just about anything was amazing. Buying it in 1981 also meant I was at the very beginning of the PC revolution. My Apple II cost about $1200 and I bought it through the mail (none were being sold in Baton Rouge then). It came with a floppy disk drive and 64K of programmable memory. Wow!
I subscribed to 3 Apple magazines that had lots of programs I could type in, learn from and then modify to my needs. I also learned about the two Steves - Jobs and Wozniak. Woz the ultimate techno nerd and Jobs the great promoter. Woz would talk about the future stuff we could do to improve our Apples and Jobs would talk about where the world was heading due to a great technology revolution.
As good and successful as the Apple II was (they made it for over a decade!) The next two Apple PCs - The Apple III and Lisa were economic disasters. Even their successor the venerable Macintosh took literally years to take off. And somewhere in that chain of events, Apple let Steve Jobs go. As we all know he came back to start the "i" revolution. ipod, ipad, iphone...
Steve was always about design before function and design integrated into function. The PCs IBM made were boring, square and very functional. Apple PCs just looked better. So much better that there were Apples in museums of art! The importance of design over function lead the incredible success of all Apple products. They are innovative and usually first in class products. They are also pretty expensive. There is no "cheap" Apple product. Thus their tremendous margins and profitability. All thanks to Steve Jobs vision.
I'll miss the Apple product introductions that Steve was famous for. The demonstrations of products that catch your imagination and set you free from limitations the rest of the technology world impose. Vaya con dios Steve. You will be missed here.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
#201 - The new PC
My 4 year old Ultra PC was showing its age last week. Actually it was sounding its age with lots of grinds and hums and fan whines. So what to do? I need a PC to run PCSS. I have accounting and email on the PC that just doesn't work the same on my Mac Mini.
That pushed me to a new PC. Choosing a PC is always a tough decision. What processor? How much memory, What kind of Graphics? So lets see how I visited each of these questions and their answers.
The PC we went with is an HP 6005 Pro minitower PC. It comes with lots of options and flavors so that decision just brought more questions.
Processor did not mean as much to me as some other geeks. The Intel "i" series and the AMD Phenom series are their top end processors. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. For every day computing: Spreadsheets, Word Processing, Internet surfing almost any of the new processors would work. For me it came down to cost per speed. The winner was the AMD Phenom II x4 3.02Ghz processor. This is an upper speed mid range processor. Great multimedia performance with a reasonable cost. I got this processor in the HP desktop for the same price as a slower lower grade Intel processor.
How much memory? The PC came with 4GB of internal memory and a 500GB hard disk drive. Those are plenty for my needs. It came with Windows 7 Professional 64bit edition. I had a spare 2GB memory stick so I put it in for a total of 6GB memory. It seems faster then the Windows XP computer I left with 2GB of memory. Note that Windows 7 - 32 bit edition can only see 3.75GB of memory, no more.
I'm still working on Graphics. The HP PC came with ATI Radeon 4200 graphics internal to the motherboard. I'm going to get a bigger screen (24" vs 19" I have now) so I'll probably need a graphics card that can push more pixels on the bigger screen. The ATI will only do 1280x1024 resolution and I'm sure the 24" display will want 1600x1200 resolution. I'll let you know when I get this worked out.
The PC came with a nice DVD-RW drive with lightscribe printing on CDs/DVDs. I'll add another drive so I can do copies. I'll also put in a media card reader so I can put my camera card in without an add on item.
The tough part is the software. I'm going with Office 2010 (I've been using Office 2003!), Adobe Acrobat 9 (X is the latest version) and Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 7.0 and Google Chrome. Move all the files and favorites, install the AVG antivirus and more. Changing PCs isn't a whole lot of fun. Thank goodness its almost done!
That pushed me to a new PC. Choosing a PC is always a tough decision. What processor? How much memory, What kind of Graphics? So lets see how I visited each of these questions and their answers.
The PC we went with is an HP 6005 Pro minitower PC. It comes with lots of options and flavors so that decision just brought more questions.
Processor did not mean as much to me as some other geeks. The Intel "i" series and the AMD Phenom series are their top end processors. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. For every day computing: Spreadsheets, Word Processing, Internet surfing almost any of the new processors would work. For me it came down to cost per speed. The winner was the AMD Phenom II x4 3.02Ghz processor. This is an upper speed mid range processor. Great multimedia performance with a reasonable cost. I got this processor in the HP desktop for the same price as a slower lower grade Intel processor.
How much memory? The PC came with 4GB of internal memory and a 500GB hard disk drive. Those are plenty for my needs. It came with Windows 7 Professional 64bit edition. I had a spare 2GB memory stick so I put it in for a total of 6GB memory. It seems faster then the Windows XP computer I left with 2GB of memory. Note that Windows 7 - 32 bit edition can only see 3.75GB of memory, no more.
I'm still working on Graphics. The HP PC came with ATI Radeon 4200 graphics internal to the motherboard. I'm going to get a bigger screen (24" vs 19" I have now) so I'll probably need a graphics card that can push more pixels on the bigger screen. The ATI will only do 1280x1024 resolution and I'm sure the 24" display will want 1600x1200 resolution. I'll let you know when I get this worked out.
The PC came with a nice DVD-RW drive with lightscribe printing on CDs/DVDs. I'll add another drive so I can do copies. I'll also put in a media card reader so I can put my camera card in without an add on item.
The tough part is the software. I'm going with Office 2010 (I've been using Office 2003!), Adobe Acrobat 9 (X is the latest version) and Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 7.0 and Google Chrome. Move all the files and favorites, install the AVG antivirus and more. Changing PCs isn't a whole lot of fun. Thank goodness its almost done!
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