I am posting this because not everyone who reads this discussion list is also aware of what is happening with the newest computer systems. An interesting series of articles is developing on <www.tomshardware.com> about the present state of CPU's - AMD Athlon & Intel P-III & P-4. It is worth knowing what are the capabilities of the soon to be SURVPCs. (Warning the web pages on this site are often SLOW to load on an analog telco connection - these folks use a lot of advertising stuff plus Java scripts. However the info is some of the best available on late model hardware.) John Oram CPU Scaling Analysis - Part 1 - AMD Athlon info <http://www1.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q1/010308/index.html> CPU Scaling Analysis - Part 2 - Intel P-III scaling & upgrading <http://www1.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q1/010319/index.html> Article about six Pentium 4 motherboards <http://www1.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q1/010321/index.html> This is the place for all the motherboard reviews - don't bother with articles written in year 2000. The CPU /motherboard stuff changes very fast & it is tough to stay up with the newest component designs... The motherboard articles will fill you in on the newest memory types as well. The big thing to check out is what is the maximum number of memory slots (at least three and preferably four) and max. amount of memory - some boards limit you to 512 MB RAM others can go as high as 1.5 GB of RAM. This will be important to undertand 18 months from now when these are the less that $250 US SURVPCs out in the used/salvage computer marketplace. <http://www1.tomshardware.com/mainboard/index.html> This is the place for CPU - processor reviews. Same thing applies about older articles. Look at the "Lord Kyro-part 2" article which is about CPU fans & explains their design and noise factor. 18 months from now if everyone is still purchasing 110/220V shore power desktop computers and using high output CPUs - the cooling fans will be a BIG deal - the noise sitting next to them will be a BIGGER deal... <http://www1.tomshardware.com/cpu/index.html> This place has an excellent series of articles about flat panel displays even thought they are old. Flat panel display pricing is dropping and will continue to drop for the next 18 months. <http://www6.tomshardware.com/display/index.html> Here are the articles on hard drives - they change slower and the stuff from a year ago is what the average OEM computer installs. Maxtor just announced an 80 GB hard drive - the 75 MB IBM IDE drives are selling for less than $335 US on the street. With a pre-1998 BIOS you would only have 10 partitions on that one - except DOS & Windows won't handle more than four total partitions. So you gotta learn a UNIX flavor to stay off the Micro$oft Windows OS stuff... <http://www4.tomshardware.com/storage/index.html> Here is what it takes to build a late model AMD CPU-based computer <http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/01q1/010219/index.html> To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
