I read an "article" in a Times of India supplement today morning giving "tips" on this topic. I can't remember all of it now, but a couple of things that got my goat - a scanner and a TV tuner are both output devices and may conflict with one another; and Windows 98 is better for games than Windows XP.
I have only seen a couple of shady games that absolutely refused to run under XP, I guess all the games released after XP was released would run just fine. And I don't know whether Doom 3 will agree to run on 98.
Another recommedation was to avoid serial ports and go for as many USB ports as one can - honestly, I have NOT seen any motherboard commercially sold in the past several years that didn't have a USB port. Something along the lines of 'avoid USB 1.1, get USB 2.0, look for FireWire' would make much more sense. Serial port? I think I'll keep one, thanks, to plug my old external modem into.
There was another statement along the lines of 'multimedia is optional, buy speakers only if you need them, sound is overrated, just for effect, etc.'. (I, for one, never bought into this 'multimedia enabled' marketing gobbledegook. What does it mean? That there is a sound card and a couple of cheap speakers? It may have made sense when there was no integrated sound on the motherboard and getting a sound card was a big deal. Why don't they just say 'sound enabled'? What other media does a multimedia computer support anyway?) Sound is mostly integrated nowadays and speakers cost starting from 500 bucks. What's the idea behind advising people to not go for it?
The point behind this post is to wonder who the people are who write such 'tips'? Do they know what they are talking about and seriously dumb down the article to cater to the layman? Or are they just filling out space? Why don't they recommend specific configurations instead of making statements like 'Windows 98 is better for games'? Why don't they explain the Megahertz (now Gigahertz, I guess) myth? Why don't they tell us all about FSB, HT, HTT, IDE, SATA, AGP, PCIe, GB, GHz, kbps and so many other terms that a normal buyer would choke upon?
I feel so strongly on this topic because I have been approached by many folks asking for a recommendation on a configuration. They plan to buy the very latest ('I NEED a 3.2GHz CPU', 'I NEED Intel', 'I want the 800MHz FSB', 'I will get a webcam and 5.1 speakers') when all they know they will do is surf the web and read email and play their MP3's. Articles in the media only seem to contribute to the confusion. And a scanner is not an output device, neither is a TV tuner.
2 comments:
True. But hey, why do you read Times of India in the first place. I gave up ToI one year back. I read a real newspaper these days :=). I read the Indian express.
ho ho ho...
well buddy, they would have spoken about the things you want to ... but that's greek n latin for them and of-course uncomfortable... they have published 'their' understanding!
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