Hi, I think that the average user is not too worried about the fact that one system may be a bit faster than the other one on number crunching or Benchmarks. The daily work is not benchmark, it is usually a lot of everything, including I/O (I think that's what Roy said some time ago).
Printing over the PAR device on a Q40 was very slow, for example. My old ATARI TT was printing at about 4 times the speed with the first SMSQ/E. After Tony Tebby and I spent quite some time on fiddling with the interrupt and generating them without the printer's help, we managed to speed up printing a bit - but it was still slower than on the ATARI TT. Peter Graf sent me a program which printed a file to the parallel port much faster, but this was then done in a loop and not through the device. That wasn't a real solution for me - a bit tedious not to be able to print to PAR, but to a file first and then have the file spooled to the port. I am a bit of a "port maniac" because I need several printers, but here is QPC more than helpful. Up to 8 serial ports, up to 4 parallel ports (or printers connected somewhere somehow, e.g. USB or LAN) give me the highest flexibility I can think of. Even if we manage to print to EPSON emulators or via postscript or whatever (I am refering to the printer language problem here), there is the problem that most modern printers only come with USB connectors. The more expensive models come with USB and PAR, but how long is this going to last? More and more printer models have the PAR connector removed. I/O is the key in many other aspects. Have you ever tried an optical mouse? If so, would ever want to go back to a ball mouse? I don't think so. Without a PS/2 connector or USB on the Qx0's it will be hard to find a mouse for the serial port in general, let alone a hi-tech mouse (although cordless and optical are fairly cheap nowadays). You all probably know that I was an ATARI fan for many, many years, and I like my TT very much. However, since technology moves on, and QPC got better and better, I somehow did not like to have to go back to the "old" stuff after I got used to the new, much better devices on my PC and QPC. And as I said: when Marcel introduced the very many IO ports this made my TT obsolete. I was worried about the USB etc. already years ago when I still favoured my TT, but there was no real solution. Nowadays, the situation is much more pro-USB. There are problems (driver problems, "unknown device" etc. and for the QL programmers USB must be a nightmare), but when the devices work they are great! And you really don't have a choice anyway. Don't get me wrong: I am not telling you that you should buy a PC because it's a PC to run Windows, no, I am trying to give you an idea how flexible QPC can be used on it - and what you have to consider in terms of I/O, connecting devices, monitors, flat screens, printers, mice, modems, and whatever. This should all go into your decision before you spend a lot of money on either product. Both have their advantages, both have their disadvantages, but talking about the speed only is quite misleading (and I don't know or don't care whether a Q60 is faster or slower than a state-of-the Art PC and which product is cheaper or more expensive ... just seeing a leaflet of a brandnew, ridiculously cheap ALDI PC here with virtually everything in it - NO, I am NOT tempted to buy it!) The main question should be: how are YOU going to use the system, what are you going to do with it and what do you want/plan to connect to it. Regards Jochen
