Finally, I've upgraded

[spot]

The relief, you've no idea. I spent all of last month getting online with an 8" screen on a sub-notebook 266MHz with 64 MB of memory. Masochism having its limits I eventually rummaged in a corner of the attic and found a desktop and monitor. I have absolutely no idea where it came from or whose it was - I'd certainly never set hands on it before - but I cleaned off the dust and now, finally, I can at least multi-task.

Here are a few reviews of what I'm using.

There's no question why Dell's new 550-MHz Dimension XPS T550 is number one on our power chart. One of the first PIII-550 systems we've tested, it easily outperforms everything we've seen so far. Its PC WorldBench 98 score of 309 sets a new Windows NT 4.0 speed record and beats the score of its closest competitor, Compaq's Deskpro EN 6550+ (number 12 on the chart). Priced at $2659, the Dell is also $460 cheaper than the Deskpro.

Designed for power users, the Dimension XPS T550 includes not one but two removable-storage devices: a Zip drive and a CD-RW drive, making it especially useful for creating custom CD-ROMs and backing up large amounts of data.


Review Date: 1 May 1999

Price when reviewed: (£2,149 inc VAT)

The XPS T550 features a 550 megahertz (MHz) Intel Pentium III processor with 512 kilobytes (KB) of L2 cache and a 100MHz system bus. As with most Pentium III systems, the Dimension ships with 128 megabytes (MB) SDRAM, and by using either of the two DIMM slots available, you can expand the SDRAM to a massive 768MB.

There's a lot in this machine - you get a US Robotics V.90 voice/fax modem in addition to the DVD decoder, the graphics card and the sound card, which leaves you with a choice of either two further PCI cards or one PCI and one ISA. The same is true of the drives: there's a 7,200 rpm IBM Janus UltraDMA hard disk with a huge 22Gb capacity, a 250Mb Iomega Zip drive, and a 4.8-speed Toshiba DVD-ROM. If you do want more, there are two 3.5in bays (one internal) and one external 5.25in slot free.

On top of this you get 128Mb of RAM on a single module as standard, leaving two more sockets free. Again, this ought to provide enough headroom for the lifetime of the machine. This is an extremely fast machine, and is equal to almost any task.




And yes, I did put that extra memory in just like it suggested.



Our Fathers being weary,

Laid down on Bunker Hill;

And tho' full many a morning,

Yet they are sleeping still, -

The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,

In streams I see them rise,

Each with a solemn musket

A marching to the skies!

[Snowfire]

Wow, you've been dragged, kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Still you can always warm your toast on the valves

[Betty Boop]

But, is it fast?

[CARLA]

Those were the days I have one in our Board Room attached to the overhead projetor and sound system. I bumped the ram as far as it can go and upgraded the video card still going strong for what its asked to do. Hate to put it out to pasture so I will keep moving it around the office it is a work horse.

[spot]

It never crossed my mind to swap in a newer video card. It's got the nVidia RIVA TNT 16MB it was released with.

In answer to Betty's "is it fast" the answer is no. On the other hand, it's not slow. It's surprisingly tolerable. I'm running, among other things, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express, and the minimum spec machine for that is "1.6 GHz or faster processor" and more memory than will fit. It's not stopped the package from doing its job.

The price, though. Look at the price. $2500 and then a bit. I bet not many people here are typing on a $2500 computer.

[along-for-the-ride]

I am trying to visualize spot's computer:



I thought you might find the following article interesting:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/142550/1 ... ctive.html

I do have a Tandy 1000 TL in my home and it still works. I need to fire her up again sometime soon and see what she's got. She's not connected to the net, but there are games on floppy disks and old programs installed.

[fuzzywuzzy]

YouTube - Monk needs help opening a book

this is just for you spot ....I think you'll see the humour in it.:wah:

[spot]

along-for-the-ride;1317268 wrote: I do have a Tandy 1000 TL in my home and it still works. I need to fire her up again sometime soon and see what she's got. She's not connected to the net, but there are games on floppy disks and old programs installed.


I never saw one of those. I wrote a few applications for the TRS-80 but even that was just occasional. I still have the 16kB-RAM machine I first went online with though. I used to write a monthly column about the Apple II back then as well.