Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

.. or, thanks for the memory!

Well, that’s that for another year – the festivities are over, and we journey now into a year that reads the same from both ends – 2002. Quite what it will bring PC-wise is hard to predict, but it does look as though the industry is experiencing an upturn. The usual weathercock for this is the price of RAM – as RAM prices drop, so do the prices for everything else. If and when RAM prices start to rise again, though, it usually spells a period when sales of PCs and other fairly highly priced kit have accelerated somewhat.

So, given that there have been five consecutive weeks with RAM pricing moving upward from the extremely low £14 for a PC 133 256MB DIMM I saw in a local shop to the almost ridiculous £37 I saw yesterday, it seems reasonable to suggest that they’re selling more PCs – and that the RAM glut has dried up – or is at least drying up.

That’s not all bad news, of course. I’ve also noticed that the cost of Pentium 4 based systems seems to have dropped in line with the RAM price increase – which means that the overall cost of a well-hung system should be no more than it was a few weeks ago, but, of course, with more RAM in the box. That strikes me as being a good thing – and with Intel’s usual price-cutting round due in February, prices should drop a little further, while RAM complement rises or remains stable.

Trends

The last year has developed a number of trends – and I’m using the term more in the “trendy” vein than  as a pointer of things to come. For some reason it has become trendy to have a flat LCD-type monitor. A quick wander into any of the high street stores will confirm that, as the prices on LCD monitors have dropped to something approaching sensible, you can now buy almost any PC with one of these flicker-free jobs attached.

I just wonder, though, how many folks have parted with £300 of their hard-earned and got their LCD screen home only to discover that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be in the moving picture department, and decidedly limited when it comes to games playing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that LCD monitors are, per se, bad things. They’re not. In the right place, and for the right applications, they’re a fine, space-saving, eye longevity enhancing piece of kit. But for deep colour (that is to say high-end image manipulation) and gaming use, they’re still not on a par with a traditional CRT monitor (the one that looks like a telly!).

The drawback, you see, is that they’re effectively fixed resolution – since each LCD is composed of a matrix of tri-coloured cells that’s (for example) 1024 wide by 768 deep, and can manage only 16 bit colour (that’s 64k colours) your average 32MB graphics adapter that can go to 1920x1440 in 24 or 32 bit colour is rendered somewhat overkill. All that power, and nowhere to use it.

Now, like I say, it’s not a problem if you never play games, never edit digital images and don’t want to watch your DVDs on your PC (a pastime I’ve never really understood). But if you do, any of these things, do bear in mind that you can pick up a 19 inch monitor that can handle 1600x1200 in 32 bits for a little less than the cost of a 15 inch LCD monitor.

XP

One trend I do condone, though, is the move towards the more capable NT family of operating systems. I know it’s early days yet for Windows XP, and those of us that have made the move are still, to some extent, guinea pigs and beta testers, but, to my mind at least, it’s a step in the right direction. And I’ll tell you why.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had a fair few queries from folks trying to get their DOS based games and applications to run with Windows 98 (which includes 98SE and Windows Me). I’ve even been out to one or two to see if I can get their games to run, and, every time I’ve been involved, I’ve come away wishing that there was just no way that you could do the deed. I’ve also got to say that I’ve seen more PCs rendered useless by folks fiddling with system files in order to get an ancient copy of Space Invaders to run.

So operating systems that have no DOS stub in them, and which will not run these old games are, to me, a great idea. They sacrifice that element of backwards compatibility in order to move reliability forward and give us all a more stable platform upon which to do the things we do. Frankly, I’ve seen a few games running on Windows XP, and they look so much better than these old DOS based games anyway. I can’t really see a problem with making the move. There’s always the point that there are such things as games consoles as well!

High Points

2001 had a few high points for me. Over the year, PPC has seen its readership grow enormously, which is always gratifying for an editor. It’s also seen a completely new design that, I think, looks very neat, and incidentally, is also much faster to load than the old one. We’ve seen Monday night Chats settle into a comfortable pattern of Q&A and problem solving, with more than a few regulars popping in to help out the newer folks. It seems we’re building a bit of a community, which, again, is really rather nice to see.

Outside of PPC, I’ve been happy to see broadband finally taking off. More an more people are discovering the joys of fast internet connections, and those that haven’t have reaped the benefits of unmetered connections – the freedom to surf, download and email to your heart’s delight, without having to worry about the phone bill. Now that’s progress!

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David Dorn