How to
Deal with Rapidly Changing Technology |
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Copyright 1997 by Jonathan C. Hauff (This article appeared in an edited format in Westchester Commerce Magazine) Personal computer technology changes so rapidly, a newly purchased PC is apparently obsolete before it is installed! However, one of the nicer features of personal computers is that the individual components (of most PC’s) can be removed and replaced with the newer, better parts with relative ease, and very often at a lower price than the component’s original cost. Are there new features available in the latest VCR or automobile that you would like to have? To get them, you have to buy the new model. Not so with the PC! There are industry standards in the PC world that allow for the interchange of parts. While it is not always practical to "upgrade" a PC, at least it is an option to be considered. The unspoken assumption, though, is that your PC is, indeed, compatible! I dealt a bit with this "compatibility" issue a few months ago, but there are some additional important points that need to be made. While you would think that compatibility would be an ideal that each manufacturer would strive to meet, such is not the case! Compatibility to industry standards has become less common over the past two years. Nearly every major manufacturer has moved away from industry standards, and is supplying proprietary PCs. Once you have purchased a PC which contains components available only from the original manufacturer, be prepared to pay two, three, or more times the going rate for those parts! Remember, even a multi-year warranty only covers the original specified components! If you want to upgrade your PC, and find that the parts are only available from a single source, watch your wallet! Two additional compatibility traps have also appeared. The first of these I call the "operating system trap". The operating system supplied with most PCs is Windows 95. PCs have always been supplied with a copy of their operating system in diskette form. In past years, it was usually DOS, or Windows 3.1. These operating systems would require as many as eight diskettes to hold, and were supplied with the PC. Windows 95 is many times larger than previous operating systems, which is why it is usually supplied in the CD-ROM format so that it fits on a single disk. While Windows 95 can be furnished in diskette form, nearly 30 diskettes are required. You would think that a manufacturer would supply the CD-ROM version with their CD-ROM equipped PCs, but some do not! You are expected to furnish your own diskettes, and spend hours making them on you own! If that was not bad enough, any PC user of experience knows that a single set of "master" diskettes is not enough, you should have at least one back-up set in case of trouble. Here is what happens with many PC's bought today: They furnish an euphemistically titled "rescue disk", whose only function is to destroy all the programs and data on your system, and return it to the state it was when you first bought it! This "solution" is presented far, far too freely and often. Anyone can erase a hard drive and start over - being able to recover from an error without hurting the rest of the system may require some time, skill and effort. While destroying all of your work makes things very easy for the manufacturer's technical support department, it is a potential disaster for you. The other trap of recent vintage is the "warranty service trap". These systems are now furnished with a "seal" that breaks if the PC case is opened. This seal can only be replaced by the manufacturer's service center (who is NOT the dealer from whom you bought the PC!). |
Here is how they work
this warranty: while in effect, you do not own the inside of your own computer! Only the
manufacturer's service center is allowed to do any work on your system! If the seal is
broken, your multi-year warranty is void…no excuses! I know of someone who purchased
an extended warranty with their PC, but wanted more memory in it before he bought it. The
salesman broke the seal, and installed the memory, thereby voiding the warranty he had
just sold the customer! To avoid these "traps", it is usually better to purchase
from a major mail- order company, or a "clone" from a reputable local manufacturer.Compatibility is of major importance to these manufacturers, and some very good deals are to be had, as well. And always ask about upgrades, warranty service provisions, and whether the Windows 95 operating system CD is furnished with the PC. Once the PC is installed, a user "self-inflicted trap" comes from the overuse of "utility" programs. These programs all promise disaster prevention, recovery, and maintenance of your Windows 95 system (and they come in such attractive boxes!). While I would not want to run a PC without some anti-virus software, you should be aware that such software slows your system’s performance by as much as 10 percent. Each additional utility program further degrades your system’s performance by about the same percentage. Most of these programs indicate their presence by placing a small icon next to the clock on the lower right edge of the standard Windows 95 screen. A long row of icons means a lot of programs running at the same time. Add a "screen saver", and run a few "real" programs as well, and you have one busy little PC! An additional consideration is in software design. Most companies do not have the facilities or budget to do the extensive testing of their software that you might expect. Good software designers expect you to be running other programs along with theirs, but many apparently expect you to be running their software, and theirs alone! As the capabilities and storage capacities of the PCs have grown, conflicts between programs has become increasingly common. How to avoid this? Keep your utility and background programs to a minimum. The fewer programs that are running at once, the less likely you will encounter a program conflict. And if such a conflict occurs, it is far easier to diagnose a simple system than a complex one! For the remainder of this column, let’s deal with the most popular operating system for PCs: Windows 95. Although it is not widely publicized, there are multiple versions of Windows 95. The original release (Release 1), the upgrade version, and Release 2. If you bought a PC after September 1995, it was furnished with Release 1. If you purchased a PC in the past few months, it was probably furnished with Release 2. The copyright date on the original disk, or the date of the file COMMAND.COM file on the hard drive will be 1995 for Release 1, and 1996 for Release 2. If you upgraded to Windows 95 from a previous version, you also have Release 1. There are only minor differences between the two releases, the biggest benefit for most new PC owners is that hard disks larger than 2 gigabytes need not be subdivided in Release 2, but can be one single, large storage area. The concern for a business owner, however, is the hidden problem of mixing two different releases in a single office. This is a problem with which many business owners have had to deal with over the years when a new release of DOS would be furnished with a newly purchased additional PC. All the software "tools" used should be checked to make certain they work under both releases. These include backup software, anti-virus software, and utility software. This may require a few phone calls to the manufacturers of these products, and some outlay of cash for appropriate upgrades for your new Release 2 system. The diskette used to recover from problems, the "startup disk" that each Windows 95 owner should have, does not work across the two release versions. In other words, a Release 1 startup disk will not start a Release 2 system, nor will a Release 2 start a Release 1 system. Discovering this after a system has crashed is not the time to get an education in PC maintenance! |BACK| |
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