Our rating system is as follows:
Yes -- Looks like a good bet
Questionable -- not a front runner right now
No - don't bother -- has some obvious problems
| Element | Base |
Median |
High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $1,850 | $3,100 | $4,500 |
| Processor | 133-MHz Pentium | 200-MHz Pentium | 200-MHz Pentium Pro |
| RAM | 16 MB of SDRAM | 32 MB of SDRAM | 64 MB of EDORAM |
| Hard Drive | 2.1 GB | 3.2 GB | 4.3 GB |
| Backup | 1.6/3.2 GB Tape | ||
| CD-ROM Drive | 8X EIDE | 12X EIDE | 12X EIDE |
| Video Card | 2 MB DRAM | 2 MB EDO | 4 MB VRAM |
| Monitor | 15" LS | 17" LS | 20" TD |
| Sound Card | SoundBlaster 16 | ||
| Speakers | Altec Lansing ACS90 | ||
| UPS Power | APC BackOffice 250VA | ||
| Modem | 33.6 US Robotics | ||
| Service | 3-year onsite | ||
We are currently using 100 MHz Pentium Dell Dimension XPS with 16 MB or RAM as our standard hardware platform. They don't make machines this slow any more, but we like Dell, and if you are in the market for a new box I don't think you can go too far wrong by checking out the Dell Dimension XPS series.
Most of these boxes have anywhere from 1 to 3 gigs of disk storage, and we are finding that you can't get a hard drive that is too large. The Dells are particularly nice since the installation of the new hard drive is fairly straightforward.
We are migrating toward 32 MB of RAM, since this seems to be the next most cost-effective upgrade [apart from larger hard drives] to improve the performance of these machines. The extra 16 MB of RAM is going for about a hundred bucks, and this should solve a lotta the nasty disk thrashing we have seen due to the Windoze virtual memory manager swapping files from RAM to disk. The place to go for RAM seems to be The Chip Merchant
We use 28.8 kbps modems from US Robotics, both the basic Sportster, which now comes factory installed from Dell, and the more expensive Courier.
These modems comply with the V.34 28800bps standard which was approved in 1994. Additional information on modems is at CURT'S High Speed Modem Page, with additional pointers at Yahoo
We use both older Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II 300 dpi laser printers, which continue to provide excellent service after nearly a decade of use, as well as the newer LaserJet 4+ printer, which is faster and provides 600 dpi output.
We use the older [they don't make them any more] Hewlett-Packard Scanjet 3c scanner for optical character recognition for document management, as well as for graphics applications.
Its hard to imagine, but back in the old daze if you had some app on your desktop in addition to a word processor you were a real power user, and now its hard to avoid a situation in which your desktop is so cluttered with apps that you can't even remember what half this stuff is supposed to do, even.
We implemented Windoze 95 in early 1996. We do not plan to migrate to Windoze NT anytime soon, given the current absence of interesting and relevant applications that exploit the capabilities of this operating system.
We are currently using CorelÆ WordPerfectÆ Suite 7 for WindowsÆ 95 for an integrated software suite. This stuff is serious bloatware compared to earlier releases, and rather slow on our old boxes, but it works just fine for us.
This office suite includes:
We use Delrina WinFax PRO to send and receive faxes. Sending a fax from any Windows application is as easy as printing a document, and it includes powerful capabilities to create groups for faxcasting with its phonebook features.
OmniPage Limited Edition 4.0 from Caere works pretty good for us much of the time, though there are some documents the thing just flat out refuses to recognize, even though the text is pretty clean. Their current flagship release is OmniPage Pro 7.0 which they claim, using Quadratic Neural Network TM (QNN) technology, will more accurately improve recognition accuracy on a broad range of page, from clean to degraded. However, the most significant accuracy improvement is claimed to be found using faxes, photocopies, or low-resolution scans. Current owners of any Caere OCR product (including all versions of OmniPage or WordScan purchased by themselves or bundled with a scanner) are eligible to upgrade to OmniPage Pro for Windows 95 for $129.
NeuroTalker OCR from International Neural Machines is said to thrive on the kinds of documents--faxes and low-contrast pages--that give other OCR programs fits. NeuroTalker uses INM's proprietary Genetically Enhanced Neural Network Identification Engine (GENIE) to decrypt pages of text with high accuracy. This gizmo is fast, powerful and inexpensive, but it lacks ease of use. List Price: $99
Starfish's Dashboard 95 single control panel for all the resources of Windows 95 - maybe not the best, but it comes bundled with Corel PerfectOffice
Norton Navigator - the best of the lot, but $99 may be a bit much for this sorta thing.
RegClean is a free utility from Microsoft that should be used every few weeks to clean up obsolete Registery entries
File Utilities / Word for Word(R), available from Adobe for Windows(R) 3.1, Windows 95, Macintosh(R), DOS, and UNIX(R), quickly converts word processing, spreadsheet, database, and graphics files to and from applications. Word for Word automatically recognizes more than 250 Windows, Macintosh, DOS, and UNIX formats as well as HTML, while preserving the formatting and layout of the original documents. And for a mere $149 it sounds like a must have.
Colorado Memory Systems,a division of Hewlett-Packard, is the leading supplier of minicartridge tape drives in the world.
You need to keep at least 100 MB of space free on the drive [normally the C drive] used as the swap drive by Windows for virtual memory management [in which files are moved in and out of RAM as they are needed]. Utilities are useful for finding and deleting surplus files to keep your drive from filling up with useless files, among other nice things.
DiskMapper for the PC produces a
schematic representation of your hard drive. While viewing your drive map, you can get a close-up view of any subdirectory. Just click on the "Zoom" button. DiskMapper will zoom you in to the contents of the subdirectory and fill up your screen with a more detailed view.DiskMapper can be purchase online for $39.95
UNINSTALLER 4 from Microhelp makes it easy to free up disk space, and is said to be more careful than the competition. PC Labs' testing showed that both CleanSweep 95 and Remove-It 95 offered to remove from Windows some essential dynamic link library (.DLL) files and OLE server applications. Of the three programs tested, only MicroHelp's Uninstaller 3.0 did not offer to remove any crucial Windows files.In addition to Deleting single or groups of applications, UnInstaller 4 can Archive seldom used
applications; Move them to another place on your computer, or Transport them to another PC. Retails for $39.95.
WinProbe 95 is a system utility gizmo and CleanSweep 95 is an uninstaller from Quarterdeck -- the CleanSweep seems to be the most agressive [and thus most hazardous] of the lot.
Remove-It - one of the handful of products on the market, with nothing remarkable one way or the other.
WinDelete 3.0 - the least expensive and least effective.
For transmission over the net or otherwise, large files are sometimes compressed, using the ZIP, tar, gzip, z, arc, arj, and lzh or some other compression technique, not to mention all those pesky Internet file formats (UUencode, XXencode, BinHex, MIME, and Unix compress).. You need a gizmo to compress [and more frequently] uncompress such files.
WinZip 6.2 from Nico Mak computing is simple and easy to use, and has a list price of only $29.
Norton AntiVirus 2.0 for Windows 95 from Symantec detects, elminates and repairs damage from viruses and Word macros. Live Update periodically combs their Web site for updates and new virus definitions, and even downloads and installs them for you automatically. Available at an estimated retail price (ERP) of $70. The only problem is that it isn't too clear how this functionality differs from that of the Norton Utilities.
We are currently using the 3.01 commercial versions of NetScape which can be downloaded from their site. Unlike the situation with prior beta releases, this build does not expire, and the only thing that you are purchasing by buying it is technical support, so if you just want the browser, its free as far as we can see.
We will certainly migrate to the Netscape Communicator 4.0 as soon as they have a stable build sometime in mid-1997.
L-View:
This is a graphic file view that can be used to sample images
found on the Web. Netscape itself can also view images, but L-View
allows editing and a better way of saving the file for future use.
RealAudio: By far the coolest
thing to hit the Net since the
Netscape. RealAudio allows you to listen to sound files over the Net as
they are being download in real time. Some sites that feature RealAudio
are the C-SPAN web site
and National Public Radio
Adobe Acrobat Reader ya gotta have this one
Envoy Viewer
Microsoft
Powerpoint
MPEG Player: Used to view motion pictures on the Net with the .MPG extension.
Wham
1.33: Necessary to
listen to sounds files on the Web
Surfbot 3.0 provides advanced Agent capabilities for Internet information discovery, retrieval and management. Operating as a
browser plug-in, Surfbot actively fetches, filters and organizes
content from any World Wide Web source. Surfbot monitors
bookmarks, downloads Web sites, searches for information, cuts
connect time, and runs automatically according to your schedule.
SmartMarks is an intelligent agent that can go look at other websites and notify you if they have been updated [we have never been able to extract usable functionality from this pesky and annoying thing]
We are currently using the Eudora Pro 3.0 e-mail application
which provides interoperability between Macintoshes and PCs across TCP/IP
networks such as the Internet. This is no-kidding the best thing going, and you are wasting your time and energy if you aren't using it.
Pointcast is the Internet news network that appears
instantly on your computer screen, including US and international news from sources like CNN, Time magazine, Reuters, PR Newswire, the LA Times, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, Wired, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald and Philadelphia Online