Pic of Toby

Table of Contents

 

============== What Are You Willing To Pay For?

I was reading about the latest efforts of the music/entertainment industry to try to force ISP's to help enforce anti-piracy laws. As an ISP I had to chuckle. I could spend a ton of money creating software that would monitor file-sharing activities and shut off violators. But, of course, I'd have about two customers after I did this. And, of course, there are tons of valid uses for file-sharing, so I'd probably get sued for disruption of legitimate business.

Then I read about some rock bands (from the descriptions it didn't sound like I'd be too interested in their music) who were publishing their music for free online in order to gain popularity. And then they were able to charge more for their concerts. Rather than fight the pirates, they turned them into customers for the part of the process that can't be pirated.

I'd like to see a music publisher who gave away MP3 copies of all the music to promote the higher-fidelity CD. This probably wouldn't work too well with pop music, but would work better with classical, jazz or other niche music. I have an extremely difficult time figuring out which pianist plays a particular piece better. The end result is that I have no copies of pieces I am fond of simply because I haven't had the time or energy to figure out which one to buy. If MP3's of all the available classical music were online and easily downloaded, I know my purchases of CD/DVD's would go up considerably.

Not long later, I discovered what had been a commercial software product was now an open source, freeware product, but that the company was still in business. They were selling support for the product. Amazingly, they made more money on support than they ever did selling the product. By giving it away, many more companies tried the product. And the percentage who needed support was greater than those who would buy an unknown product from an unknown company. There are tons of companies doing essentially the same thing -- they just didn't start out as for-sale software companies. Several of the Linux distributions are put out by commercial companies who have added their own features and provide their own support for what you could download for free if you wanted; MySQL has a free version, but you can pay for a copy if you want support included -- and the list goes on.

I tend to think that the free product, pay for support/live performance model will be the winning one. Human nature says we will opt for free when available and only pay when necessary. A model that is in line with human nature is going to be the long-term survivor. Companies that insist that human nature needs to be changed to fit their business model are not going to survive in the long run. This goes for Microsoft as well as the traditional music industry.

For the record, I don't pirate music or software. I have found, however, that open source software is frequently better than commercial and I use a lot of freeware -- which is how Mike and I produced the CIPCUG open source freeware disk. It's all stuff we use (with a couple of items recommended by other users).

============== MSI.exe/Svchost.exe Slowdown

The latest Windows Secrets newsletter has some interesting information about computer slowdowns: http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070621/#story1

For Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 (Server), Scott Dunn says that there is an issue with the automatic update feature from Microsoft that causes the processor to run at nearly 100% for long periods of time, slowing the rest of the computer to a crawl. Be careful when you read the column as he starts out talking about svchost.exe. Svchost.exe is just a Windows shell that runs a .dll file, so at any given time you might have half-a-dozen svchost.exe files running on your computer.

Microsoft has issued several supposed fixes to the issue over the past year but has missed the mark. Supposedly, the latest will fix it permanently. The latest patch is available. If you turned off automatic updating in the past year and are still having slow-downs, be sure to do a manual Windows Update and make absolutely sure you have the latest version of the automatic update software. It should help. If you are still having the issue, visit the WSOS Blog at http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/ and look for the latest article on the MSI.dll/Svchost.ext fix.

============== Rick's Rant: Where do we go from here?

By Rick Smith

To upgrade or not to upgrade? Does this stuff never end?

The answer to the first depends on your opinion of the facts and the second is always, always, NO! Let me tell you a story of one person's dilemma. We sold a system last year in March 2006. It had 1GB of RAM, Athlon 64 3000+ CPU, ASUS MB, 2 80GB SATA HD and an nVIDIA 5200 AGP graphics card with a 350W power supply. Not a bad system by yesterday's standards. During the past year, this person has upgraded RAM to 3GB and added a high-end AGP card to run Adobe programs efficiently. With having the occasional problems that plague most of us who are heavy users, he has put this unit to the test and found it to have more issues than he would like. We have helped him on occasion to tackle the various issues that pop up with using a lot of various hardware and software, not to mention the problems inherent with Microsoft Windows operating systems. All you MAC and Linux users can stop laughing now.

After the latest go-around of error messages produced its usual result of anger and frustration and a phone call to my office, I am very sympathetic to people's ongoing frustration with problems that seem to be fixed at our office that rear their ugly heads once they get back home to inflict endless abuse on the PC user. We discussed options regarding replacing his hardware and possibly upgrading the system. His one caveat was that he wanted to switch to an Intel processor and preferably use the new Core2Duo. OK, I said, let's look at what we have to do.

For starters, let's throw away the old socket 754 MB and CPU. I can barely find replacement boards any more since they've moved on to 939 and now 940. Intel's new motherboards are the 965 and 975 series that support 1066 MHz bus speed and 800 MHz RAM access. So now on the scrap pile is the CPU, MB but also the RAM. 3GB's of RAM down the toilet because DDR is now DDR2. It doesn't stop here. The expensive AGP is headed for the trash can as the AGP standard has been abandoned for PCI Express. But there's more (I feel like I'm doing a RONCO ad on the TV for $19.95 + SH): The new mainboard uses an ATX 2.0 plug requiring a 24-pin connector instead of a 20-pin. So there goes the power supply on our pile. Now, you must be thinking there can't be any more. HAH! There is! If you want to get performance out of your PC you need SATA II 300 hard drives with 16MB cache instead of 8MB. You could still keep the drives for backup purposes. So now we have almost the entire PC in a pile on the floor. So much for an upgrade; at this point we just might as well get a new PC because the only thing left is Windows XP and the software from the old unit that's worth keeping. But wait, what about Vista? Why, yes, shoppers, why not get Microsoft Windows Vista while you're at it? And who knows how much of your other software you'll have to spend money for to upgrade to get it to work with Microsoft's newest technological wonder?

As I said in the title, there's no end in sight to PC changes. And no end to the amount of money you need to spend to get the latest and greatest the world has to offer. Now, I'll leave the discussion of whether we really need all this stuff to people a lot smarter than me, but this I do know. The modern PC is one of the most useful tools ever created by mankind right up next to the automobile. I would find it hard thinking about living without one.

But like any tool, if you use it and it gets the job done better, faster and cheaper, it's sometimes worth the expense to buy a better tool. Let's forget the part about the satisfaction we feel buying something really, really cool and fancy. Nonetheless, I'm happy to be the one to offer a chance at something different.

See you next month.

============== 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.

This Saturday, June 23, I will be demonstrating Windows Vista and trying to show you why I think it is a superior platform to XP.

July 23: Panda Internet Security will be visiting.

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

Tell a friend to subscribe. Email eletter@vccomputers.com with the subject of: subscribe

To unsubscribe, send an email to eletter@vccomputers.com with the subject of: unsubscribe


Home     Sales     Networks     ISP     Web Services     Resources

For comments or corrections, please fill out our comments form.

Entire site © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Ventura County Computers



spacing marker
spacing marker