CPCUG Build Team

July 2000 Seminar

Answers to Selected Audience Questions

Processors and Chip Technology:
Q1. Please explain agin the importance of the two different kinds
of cache and how you determine which computer is better?

A1. Two types of cache exist in today's microprocessors, L1 and L2.
L1 cache, ranging in size from 32Kb to 256Kb, are the closest to the
central processing unit and speed up the processing of instructions and
data. To assist the L1 cache, a similarly but much larger cache, L2, serves
as the buffer between the L1 cache and memory. L2 cache ranges in size
from 128 Kb to 2Mb. When instructions fall outside the range of the
(L2 and L2) cache, the cache has to be loaded from the next higher level
storage. Which computer is better all depends on what you're doing and
how much you can afford. A large cache is very expensive.

Q2. Does the Pentium III still have a unique number that identifies
each processor?

A2. Most don't, but some do. Utilities right now seem to indicate
no, but only 1 BIOS seems to have a switch to turn it on or off.
Intel has developed some software to turn the serial number on and off.

Q3. You mentioned overclocking a 300 Mhz to 450 Mhz. Please comment
on the feasibility of building a computer with a less expensive CPU
with the intention of overclocking it.

A3. Given the right CPU, motherboard, and excellent cooling it is
easily done. But remember, you do so at your own risk. Damage
to the CPU can occur and manufacturer's warranties won't help you.
Search the Internet for "overclocking" and read all about it.

Q4. What is Itanium -- a brand name only?

A4. Itanium is Intel's brand name for its 64 bit microprocessor, the
first in its IA-64 offerings. It is still in development.

Q5. Is AMD equivalent to Athlon?

A5. Athlon (and Duron, Thunderbird, K6, etc.) are made by Advanced
Micro Devices (AMD).

Motherboards:

Q6. Can you explain IRQ conflicts and how to best solve (them)?

A6. Each device on the motherboard, including PCI devices, require
a method to tell the processor its ready/or had data. It does this via an
interrupt of which there are 16 in the AT model. Earlier operating systems
could only handle one device per interrupt. Today's systems can handle
several devices per interrupt. Solution: use today's OSes and plug 'n play
devices.

Q7. Will IRQs continue to be used? What are they?

A7. They are still used today and are used to signal the processor that the
signaling device is ready to send/receive data.

Q8. What size and speed motherboard is needed to do photo work?
graphics?, etc.?

A8. It's not the motherboard, its the memory, processor and hard disk.
Memory should be PC133 or faster and lots of it; Processor as fast as
you can afford; and hard disk as fast and as much as you can afford.

Q9. Does the floppy disk contoller on today's motherboards include
support of LS-120 drives? Are LS-120 drives only available as USB
devices? Will regular FD drives be USB devices?

A9. LS-120 drives come in two flavors: external drives connect via
USB and internal drives connect via the IDE bus; they do not connect
via the floppy disk controller. Floppy disk drives are considered
"legacy" devices, slated non-existance in about 2 years. (But remember
Mark Twain -- "rumors of my death are greatly exagerated").

Q10. What is a chipset?

A10. Each processor requires some support chips to make the memory,
serial ports, USB ports, BIOS, and other items function properly.
The integrated circuits that make these work are called the Chipset.
Intel and VIA are the two biggest chipset vendors today. For the
most part concentrate on the motherboard features rather than the
chipset.

Memory:

Q11. What is RDRAM memory?

A11. RDRAM is Rambus Direct Random Access Memory, a design developed
by Rambus Inc, and intellectual property company. It claims to be
faster than Synchronous Dynamic RAM, and Double Data Rate RAM (a form
of SDRAM), both of which Rambus claims it holds patents.

Disk Drives:

Q12. How often should I defrag the hard drive? Can I do it myself?

A12. You can schedule the defrag software to run at any time using
the Windows scheduler. How often, probably when your disk is greater
than 10% fragmented.

Q13. Is it possible to install a larger drive that automatically copies
the old drive data to the new drive?

A13. While the installation of a second, larger drive, will not
automatically copy from the old to the new drive, you can use a
program such as Drive Copy to accomplish this feat. If you're
looking for a mirror, you can install software, or use a RAID device
to automatically replicate what's written to one drive on the other.
However, while this is important for some classes of protection, it
is not a true backup nor a good backup strategy. If you corrupt the
internals of one file and write it, it will get written to your
mirror drive too. Backup strategies are still important.

Q14. FAT16 or FAT32 -- are there any file compatibility problems
with files on floppy's or CD-ROMs?

A14. No. FAT12 floppies, non-fat CDs, and hard disk FAT16, FAT32, and
other file systems all get resolved via the operating system.

Video Cards and Monitors:

Q15. What is required to watch TV at your PC?

A15. A TV will work just fine. You could also take up some processing
power and install a TV tuner designed for your video card and open
a window on your desktop with the latest TV programs.

Q16. TIFF images are hard to read on my monitor. How do you improve
readability?

A16. First make sure its the monitor that's the problem and not the
TIFF file or the original document scan. If its only on your monitor,
try to change (higher or lower) the resolution and see if this makes
a difference. If your video card is less than 4 mb, try replacing your
video card. Lastly, you may want to replace the monitor with
one capable of supporting 1280 x 1024 resolution and .22mm dot pitch.

Q17. What does "dot pitch" mean"?

A17. Dot pitch is the distance between color dots on the face of a
video monitor or the distance between lines on a Trinitron tube (which
doesn't use dots). Its usually expressed as .25mm dot pitch (1/4 of
a millimeter).

Sound:

Q18. Are other speakers compatible as replacement for Compaq speakers.

A18. Without knowing anything about Compaq computers, your best bet
is to call their Technical Service or check the Compaq web site.
However, a guess is that any speakers will work, as long as they
connect with a 3-wire 2.5mm plug, the standard everyone else uses.

CD ROM:

Q19. Will you please review the advantages and disadvantages of the
CD Writer Drive?

A19. Advantages are it lets you create your own CDs or backup software.
Disadvantages are they cost 3 to 5 times as much as a regular CD ROM drive.

Q20. Can a CD-RW use the cheaper CD-R media (obviously only once)?

A20. Yes. Most of todays CD Writers can write to a CD-R once and
to CD-RWs more than once. Only the early CD-R writers could not
write to CD-RW disks.

Modems:

Q21. Have you heard of cable modem standards changing soon?

A21. No.

Q22. Can you rent or purchase these modems?

A22. Some cable modem providers sell you the modems or if they're
having a promotion may give you them "free"; sometimes you
can purchase them on your own.

Q23. How does modem speed relate to Internet connection speed versus
the quality of your ISP?

A23. In general, the quality of your ISP and the speed of your modem
are two different things. We cannot address the quality of your
ISP, you need to do that on your own.

Modem speeds are two faced. One is the speed of the connection,
normally about 50667 bps. However another factor is throughput --
how fast you can download a file or serve web pages. You may have
the fastest DSL or Cable modem, but if the originating server takes
a breath every so often, you total download times will be less,
sometimes significantly less, than your channel connection speed.

Q24. How can I know my PC is under attack? Can it happen with power
on but Web not connected to? If not, how soon after connecting to
Web can my PC be hit with an attack? What is the best firewall
company or what are the top two?

A24. Your home connected disconnected from the Internet is not
subject to hack attacks unless you physically do it. Once you connect
to the Internet, your computer is subject to attack by all sorts of
malacious people. In the span of 1 hour, my firewall detected and
blocked four attacks. Most often, the attacks begin within minutes
of my connection to the Internet.

Check our links page for some of the top sources of firewall software,
some are free.

USB and I/O Ports:

Q25. What does USB really mean?

A25. Universial Serial Bus.

Q26. Can any 2 or 3 year old printers or scanners work with USB
ports? Do tape backups work with USB ports? Are there any
converters/adapters so you can use parallel printer on USB?

A26. In general, only devices designed for USB input/output can use
the ports since special drivers and cables are required. There
are a large assortment of devices designed for USB connectivity,
but there is no advantage of throwing out older devices to be replaced
solely to achieve USB connectivity. Some converter cables exist
and the PC2001 spec calls for the eventual elimination of parallel
and serial ports. But until then, stay with what you have.

Q27. Are there any backup devices that use the USB ports?

A27. Yes, Iomega has a USB ZIP drive in 100 mb and 250 mb.
Additionally, there are CD-RW drives that plug into the USB ports.

Local Area Networks:

Cases:

Q28. MicroCenter advertises that some ATX power supplies will not
work with AMD processors. Does that also mean some ATX cases won't
work?

A28. Most cases come with power supplies. Although they can be
upgraded and replaced, most often they are not. ATX power supplies
should conform to the ATX spec, currently version 2.01. Check with
the AMD web site for problems with particular power supplies, but
more often its the motherboard and not the power supply that's at
issue.

Backup Strategies:

Q29. Trade-off on backup between Tape, CD-RW, ZIP-type drives?

A29. It really all depends on speed of recover and size of your backup
Tape is slow, long to recover, but generally less expensive per GB of
storage. RW is rewritable, limited to 500MB, excellent for incremental
backups, but unknown in length of storage. CDR writes only once but
retains data for a very long time. ZIP drives are limited to the size of
their expensive disk. Long term storage also a question

Q30. What backup method is most reliable and not likely to go out
of business?

A30. It all depends. There are probably an infinite number of backup
strategies each depending on your particular need. You need to
figure what and how critical the data is, how much money you want to
invest in this, and the particular threat you're facing. I don't
think back strategies will go out of business, but archiving data
(different than backup) is a problem of how you read the media five
years from now when the drive is no longer supported (360 KB floppies?).

Peripherals:

Q31. Isn't Iomega out of business of ZIP drives at least?

A31. Iomega is still very much in business, and still making ZIP
drives, disks and other similar products.

Powers:

OS Software:

Q32. Is Windows 2000 going to replace Windows NT 4.0?

A32. According to Microsoft, Yes. And since its more stable, and
more functional, many companies are already shifting or in the
design of a rollout, which is highly complex.

Q33. Is Windows 2000 replacing Win95 and Win98?

A33. Not yet. Windows 2000 is geared toward the workplace, with
Windows 95, 98, 98se, and ME designed for the home environment.
A future release will join Windows 2000 Professional and a Windows
2000 Home edition.

Q34. How serous are Red Hat and Linux about the home PC market?

A34. With the efforts in KDE and GNU windowing environments, Linux,
Red Hat and others, is taking aim at the home market. While
more money is to be made in industry, any efforts to resolve the
desktop will find a way to the home market. In fact you can install
Red Hat (and others) on most any PC and use it in your home system
today. Sun's Star Office is another key to that can only help
expand the home market for non-Microsoft software.

Q35. Is there an alternative to Win98 for home PCs that will work with
current Netscape and Juno?

A35. Linux, in all its flavors, has versions of Netscape. If Juno can
be configured to run with a Netscape browser, you should be able
to configure the modem to link to Juno and run Linux/Netscape to do
your surfing.

Q36. You said to "check device driver availability." How do we do that?

A36. Check the devices supported by the operating system in question
by going to the vendor's web pages and look for hardware compatibility.
Also go to the device manufacturer's web pages and see if drivers are
available for your OS.

Q37. Do you know a solution or effective, consistent workaround for the
Windows 98SE shutdown issue?

A37. Since you didn't mention what the issue is, its hard to answer.
Some machines are known to hang up on shutdown, and Microsoft has
released a file to help correct this. Contact Microsoft technical
support for best answers.

Q38. Does Linux support USB? FireWire?

A38. ????

Q39. You said Windows NT 4.0 is not plug 'n' play. Why is Plug 'n' Play
so great? What are its disadvantages? What is the alternative?

A39. Plug 'n' Play permits you to plug in a peripheral card without
having to worry about address and IRQ assignments. The card allows
the OS or motherboard to make those assignments and resolve conflicts.
Its disadvantages are that if a problem exists its harder to solve.
The alternative is to use older devices that use explicit setups.

Plug 'n' Play is making it much easier to setup a computer. With its
maturity, recent products haven't had serious problems with
installation. Also PCI bus devices, targeted for plug 'n' play
technology enables faster and better performance.

Applications Software:

General:

Q40. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of a totally loaded
Compaq computer?

A40. ( What's totally loaded? )

Q41. Is there a roster of technical consultants that do on-site
transfer of data from one computer to another?

A41. Not that we're aware of.

Q42. What diagnostic software is available and what do you recommend?

A42.

Q43. Because MS Outlook was major cause of recent successful virus
attacks, can we successfully erase it from our PCs?

A43. According to Microsoft, its integral to Windows OS to leave it
installed. Try www.98lite.com and check out their software which
permits you to remove all sorts of things Microsoft says is essential
and still keep your system running.

Q44. Can you get rid of unneeded preinstalled software, and thus
save hard-disk space, by downloading it onto floppies?

A44. You most likely can REMOVE unwanted pre-installed software.
However, downloading to floppies may not work (or be worth it).
If you got the CDs or original floppies, then you can always install
later. Most of today's computers come with a restore CD, but this will
blow away any other software you installed and bring your PC up
to delivery configuration only.

Q45. How do I install new drivers from the supplies CD-ROM?

A45. Follow the instructions. Generally you go to the driver already
in the system and click on the "Have New Disk" feature. Then READ.

Q46. Where can I go to get software for DOS?

A46. The Internet if full of DOS software products. Try
www.simtel.net

Notice: The above answers are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of CPCUG nor the CPCUG Build Team.  They may not even be the right answers.

Last Updated:  07 Oct 2000