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Table of Contents

• When To Buy a New Computer
• Toby's Tirade: Sometimes It Just Doesn't Pay To Upgrade
• CIPCUG Notice
• Subscription Information

============== When To Buy a New Computer

Now that both AMD and Intel have 64-bit processors available, it is time to consider when you may want to switch to the new platform. The switch from 32 to 64-bit will be much like the switch from the AT (16 bit) to 386 processors.

The situation is a bit confusing. Microsoft has both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, but you cannot run most 32-bit programs on 64-bit Windows. This means that for users (non-servers), there is nothing much you can do with a 64-bit Windows machine today.

According to Intel's website (http://www.intel.com/technology/64bitextensions/faq.htm): "Development of a broad 'ecosystem', ranging from processors, chipsets and tools to operating systems (O/S), applications, utilities and drivers is expected to take some time to develop." To help bridge the gap, Intel has developed something called "Compatibility Mode," which will allow 32-bit applications to run on 64-bit chips, but they are unable to see or utilize the extra capabilities of the chip. However, "Existing 32-bit applications do not need to be recompiled, and may or may not benefit from the 64-bit extensions. The application will likely need to be recertified by the vendor to run on the new 64-bit extended O/S." To make matters worse, Intel has two different 64-bit platforms and programs and operating systems that will work on one won't work on the other.

I have an AMD/64 processor at home and Windows XP/64, but no programs. It does bring up the desktop quite rapidly and Notepad is very fast. But there is nothing much else to do. So I boot to my old Windows XP/32 to do any work. There will be 32-bit applications that will run OK on Intel/64 chips with EM64T running Windows XP/64 in Compatibility Mode, but certainly everything won't. Hard to know how many programs will have trouble and how much of a performance hit Compatibility Mode will be.

What are software vendors likely to do? Ideally, a software company writing software for the average user would put its current program on maintenance releases only (fix bugs and keep it up-to-date, but not add any new features or versions) and work non-stop on a new version that would run in 64-bit Windows. However, this would cause revenues to drop over the next year or so until the new version was out. Even then, there might not be many users running 64-bit Windows so sales might still be slow.

Most companies will probably assume that the money is to be made in 32-bit programs for the nonce and continue to upgrade those while having a small team work on the 64-bit version. This means that most standard commercial applications won't have 64-bit versions out for at least two years and possibly even longer. With Intel taking a three-prong approach that diverges from AMD, the upgrade path for software companies with limited resources is murky at best and the confusion is likely to slow things down more than it should.

So, what does the average user do? Probably nothing. If you want a fast system, either vendor's chip will run quite fast with your existing programs. But for 2-3 years you are probably not going to find much to run on a 64-bit operating system. And unfortunately, it isn't worth switching when there are several 64-bit programs if you still have a couple of critical ones that won't work in 64-bit. Rebooting to run legacy applications gets old fast.

Intel says quite clearly that they expect 64-bit processing to be pretty much restricted to servers for a while. Undoubtedly there will be some high-end games that play on 64-bit OS's, but you'll have to reboot to 32-bit for much of anything else.

We are close to being ready for 64-bit servers with 64-bit OS's, but desktops are going to be restricted to 32-bit for the expected life of any computer purchased today.

============== Toby's Tirade: Sometimes It Just Doesn't Pay To Upgrade

I decided that Thanksgiving weekend was a good time to perform an upgrade to the house computers. Happy Thanksgiving. I took an old 900 MHz AMD Duron computer out of service, swapped out my old 2 GHz Athlon workstation to use as my new Windows Small Business Server 2003 computer (for just the home network) and got a new Athlon 64 as my new workstation. Much faster computers all around. Should really improve things.

Yeah. First thing is that the Server install dies at the point where it needs a network card. Can't find it. Hmm. Drivers for Windows XP are supposed to work on 2003. Nope. The sound isn't working, either, but who cares about sound on a Server? If you can't connect to other computers, it's tough to serve anything. So, I can't finish the install of the server software without it. But at least my workstation is working OK. Until Friday. Then I started getting caching errors, and it took 10 minutes to boot. Oh, darn. Chkdsk took about eight hours. Good thing we had to head out of town for a few hours.

Start searching on the Internet for solutions. Found an interesting thread with people using the same Netgear FA310TX network card with Win2003.

Doesn't work. But you supposedly can copy the drivers over from the installed copy on a WinXP box and they'll work. No problem. I still had my workstation hard drive. Install it as the D: drive, but still no go.

Finally found the drivers from a download place, installed them, and the server is back in business. Still no sound, but who cares?

My workstation is another matter. I had installed two serial ATA 160 drives as a mirror (that's where everything is copied to both drives simultaneously so if one hard drive dies, you can work off the other). Some more research on the problem indicated that one of the hard drives may be going bad or that the mirror driver may not work as well as it should with WinXP. OK, break the mirror and reboot. Seems much better. Run Chkdsk. Found a bunch of errors and fixed them. Probably have to reinstall some stuff, but it all seems to be working well. It only takes about 20 seconds to boot. Not bad.

So, I now have a much faster server -- but all it does is sit there waiting for a family member's computer to copy data to it and display a few (very few) announcements on the Web page. It boots much faster, but the rest of it is about the same -- the server is waiting for the network.

My workstation is quite a bit faster, but it doesn't have any better hard disk security than my old one, which was one of the reasons I told myself I was swapping computers. And since I am mostly doing e-mail and Web pages at home, the extra speed doesn't do much for me.

I have now spent about 20 hours getting things running smoothly, with another 5-10 hours left to finish the server install and figure out what to do with the second hard drive that is currently unplugged. Do I try to reestablish the mirror or use another backup strategy? Don't know. With all the time I've spent making my computer faster, I figure I'll reach the point where the time I've saved on mouse clicks and boots will equal the time I spent on the upgrade sometime in 2020. Of course, I may have upgraded again and have to wait until 2030 to reach equilibrium -- as long as that install goes well. In fact, there is darn little I that I do now that I couldn't do on my old 386 running Windows 3.11. Think of all the money and time I'd have saved if I kept using that one.

It's a hard lesson, and one I have failed to figure out after getting hit over the head with it several times: If the old computer is working well, you lose productivity by upgrading. I know, Rick will probably have a fit that I wrote that -- it hurts computer sales. But it's true. The time to upgrade is when the old beast starts giving you problems. Fixing problems on the old, tired computer is a waste of time. But don't upgrade a smoothly working computer. Somebody remind me next time I think I have some free time.

============== CIPCUG Notice

You don't have to be a member of CIPCUG to subscribe to this E-letter, but we do make a short notice of upcoming events.

Don't forget this Saturday's general meeting, December 17, at the Camarillo Boys & Girls Club. It's the third Saturday of the month, not the fourth, because of Christmas.

============== Subscription Information

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