Epinions Computers Q&A: Week 4
Apr 03 '01 (Updated Apr 04 '01)
The Bottom Line They say one of the best ways to learn is from other people's experiences, and that's no exception when it comes to learning computer skills.
They say one of the best ways to learn is from other people's experiences, and that's no exception when it comes to learning computer skills. One of the best examples is the long standing tradition of PC "Q&A's" in computer magazines and websites, where readers submit their various questions on topics such as troubleshooting, buying advice, and upgrade advice, in hopes of getting their question (and, more importantly, the answer) published. Who knows how many hours I've saved by reading these Q&A's, and avoiding the same pitfalls that other computer users have already been victimized by?
With that in mind, I've created an email address at "computers_qa@yahoo.com" where you can send any computer-related questions you may have, and I'll "publish" the answers to the best questions in my next editorial. I will also respond via email to all questions received, even if they don't end up appearing in the actual Q&A.
I also promise to make each Q&A as educational and pertinent to the topic of "developing computer skills" as possible--not just to the people asking the question, but to everyone reading it as well. The last thing I want to do is fill my articles with esoteric solutions to obscure problems, with little relevance to anyone except the person asking the question. My goal is to make this a series of "Developing Computer Skills" editorials, but about the topics you're interested in, not just the ones I want to write about.
As far as what makes a good question goes, basically any question relating to computers is fair game. It doesn't even need to be about a specific problem or situation, but can be as general as "What's the best fastest processor today" or "How can I get my computer to run faster"? As readers of my prior epinions can probably tell, my main areas of interest deal in upgrading advice, hardware buying advice, CPU's, system optimization, and troubleshooting, although of course questions needn't be limited to these topics. Feel free to check prior Q&A's for examples of good topics.
Again, please send all questions to computers_qa@yahoo.com and also let me know, if your question makes the next Q&A, whether you would like your Epinions member name published or if you'd rather stay anonymous.
This Week's Questions:
-What Order Should I Arrange My Cards In?
-Chess Simulations: Intel Better Than AMD?
-The nVidia TNT2 M64: Good Enough Graphics Card?
-What Was the "Final" Windows 95?
-Are Old Internet Explorer Files Safe to Delete? and
-Is 205 megs of Free Hard Drive Space Enough?
What Order Should I Arrange My Cards In?
Submitted by bishop
Q: What sequence and in what slot are your components (sound card, NIC, modem etc.)
A: I haven't had to worry about arranging my cards in certain slots in my system, although it can be an issue with some motherboards that assign IRQ's depending on which slot the cards are in. That can really be a problem when you've loaded your system with lots of components and start running into conflicts. There's few things more nightmarish when it comes to computers, than having your cards conflict with each other over IRQ's--something computers these days SHOULDN'T even have to deal with, considering how archaic the whole IRQ system is. Hopefully all systems will be "legacy free" soon (100% USB ports and PCI slots, with no more obsolete serial, parallel, or ISA slots) so we'll never have to worry about IRQ's again. Of course, that's what PC makers have been promising since 1998...
Anyway, one good thing to do, which has nothing to do with IRQ's, is to keep "shorter" cards near the top and "longer" cards on the bottom inside your PC. That way you don't have the "long" cards at the top blocking airflow and preventing the heat generated by the cards from rising. Kind of like this (each line is a separate card, each in its own PCI slot):
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Arranging your cards like this ensures that hot air isn't "blocked" by the cards higher in your case. You also want to give the cards room between each other if you can (by skipping slots), and especially try to give the video card room because that's your PC's hottest component, aside from the CPU. You also might want to give your sound card room from the other components, since it helps prevent electromagnetic interference from the other cards and helps it output a cleaner audio signal.
Chess Simulations: Intel Better Than AMD?
Submitted by watchdr_2000
Q: I have a question for you about the AMD chip versus the Pentium. There are two main world computer chess championships held every year. I don't know if you are familiar with the chess programs, but they do ask a lot from the computer when they try to calculate 4 to 6 moves ahead (most Grandmasters think about 10 to 15 moves ahead, far more than any computer is capable of). Anyway, the same chess programs running on two identical comps, same speed CPU same SDRAM etc. but with different chips, the AMD versus the Pentium, the latter always outperform the former. For some reason the chess programs play much better chess when running on a Pentium based computer than on an AMD one. It's something that I don't understand and would appreciate your thoughts on this.
A: Your question is definitely one of the more intriguing ones I've received, and with my limited knowledge of chess sims I can't claim to know the answer, but I can certainly hazard a pretty good guess (and provide some info that suggests the situation may have actually "flip-flopped" over the past year).
The most obvious reason Intel CPU's have historically outperformed AMD's, at chess simulations and most programs in general, is that for many years Intel's Pentiums were all-around better performers, as well as available at much higher speeds. Even though CPU's like the original K6 were in some ways technologically superior to Intel's Pentiums, Intel almost always held the "speed advantage" by being one, two, or even three "speed grades" ahead of the competition (for example, when the Pentium II 300 was released, the next-fastest CPU was AMD's K6-233).
AMD also used to be at a disadvantage because none of ther pre-Athlon CPU's had a "fully pipelined floating point unit" as Intel's did, which many considered AMD's greatest weakness. In a nutshell, floating-point units are used for high-precision math involving decimals (as opposed to integers/whole numbers) and are crucial for complex calculations such as those used in 3D graphics. By being "fully pipelined", Pentium CPU's were able to perform floating-point instructions before prior ones had completed. CPU's like AMD's K6, however, needed to "wait" for such instructions to complete before processing new ones.
With the release of the Athlon in late 1999, however, AMD not only released their first fully-pipelined CPU, but one that was in many ways more powerful than Intel's (for example, it could perform three floating point operations at once, compared to just two for the Pentium III).
Interestingly enough, judging from the results of the "Rebel" chess benchmark at http://www.rebel.nl/bench.htm , one can see AMD and Intel results running neck-and-neck at identical clock speeds, with the Athlon outperforming the PIII in just about all cases.
Even more surprisingly, upon close inspection of the results, Intel CPU's actually rank *last* in most cases when compared to CPU's of the same speed, suggesting that Intel's historical advantage in chess performance was due to sheer clock-speed more than anything else.
That's why it's too bad these benchmark results are a bit dated, since it's in the past year (ever since the 700-800 mhz CPU's were released) that Intel actually LOST their speed lead for the first time. It would be interesting to see how the latest 1.33 ghz Athlon stacks up to the fastest Pentium III, which has been "stuck" at 1 ghz for almost a year now. An even more interesting comparison may be the Athlon vs. the Pentium 4 since--and this is pure speculation--the P4 may actually be far worse than the PIII at chess simulation, due to the nearly-infinite-branching nature of chess, and the severe "branch mis-prediction penalty" the Pentium 4 faces (far more severe than any CPU in history, in fact--for more details see my P4 review). It's too bad I haven't been able to turn up any newer chess benchmarks, since I'd definitely be interested in seeing results for the latest CPU's. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
The nVidia TNT2 M64: Good Enough Graphics Card?
Submitted from Italy by Savino Vitiello (non-member)
Q: I'm going to buy a PC (PIII 1GHZ, 128 MB SDRAM, and all the other usual stuff, and... nVIDIA TNT2 M64 32M on-board). I'm not a hardcore gamer, but a look to AMERICAN McGEE's ALICE would be so much appreciated....(just for giving you an example). Having a 15" monitor (Nec MultiSync 550), and running games at 800x600x16bit max, do you think TNT2 m64 would be a technical acceptable solution?
A: The TNT2 M64 is still a relatively decent card by "todays" standards, and should be just fine for the casual gamer. Even with graphically demanding games like A.M.'s Alice, playing in 16-bit color and at resolutions as low as 800x600 (which sounds like is your monitor's maximum resolution?), the M64 should provide smooth frame-rates.
That's mainly because the M64's biggest weakness is its limited internal memory bandwidth (1/2 as much as "regular" TNT2's) which means it tends to "choke" while playing games in 32-bit color and in high resolutions (1024x768 and higher). At 800x600 and 16-bit, the memory bandwidth won't be such a limiting factor.
Of course, in a system as powerful as yours, (1 ghz PIII), it's almost a shame that its 3D card won't even come close to taking advantage of the system's full potential. With Geforce 2's available for only about $160 (sure to drop now that the Geforce 3 has been released) it's definitely worth considering a more powerful 3D card.
What Was the "Final" Windows 95?
Submitted by asourdough4
Q: I am still working up the courage to pull Windows 98 off and return to Win 95. My effort is complicated by my not knowing what is the latest 'build' of Win 95. Was the Service Change #1 'it' or was there a #2?
A: (NOTE: To those who may be wondering why a sane person would "downgrade" back to Windows 95, Win95 has less-demanding hardware requirements than newer Windows versions, and tends to run noticeably faster on older systems than its bloated siblings Win98 and WinME)
The final version of Windows 95 was technically a rare "Version C / OSR2.5", but I'm pretty sure it was only available pre-installed on OEM systems, and not commercially available. It was basically the same as Version B / OSR2 (widely regarded as the "newest" Win95 version) except that Version C came with Internet Explorer 4.0 by default--which, interestingly, suggests that it was more of a ploy to convince OEM's like Dell, Compaq, etc. to distribute IE 4.0 than a new release that would actually help the consumer.
Unfortunately, if you have an older version than B/OSR2, there's no way to "upgrade" to Version B. You'll have to obtain an actual Version B CD. If you can't get a hold of one, you can patch any old Windows to Version A by applying the Windows 95 Service Pack 1. Unfortunately, that means no support for USB peripherals, AGP graphics cards, or the FAT32 file system, since those features were all introduced with Version B. USB and AGP obviously aren't an issue if you don't use those kinds of peripherals, but without FAT32 you're limited to a maximum of 2 gigabytes per hard drive partition, which can be a huge pain when it comes to modern 40+ gig HD's. Eventually you'll run out of letters in the alphabet just to handle all those drives :-).
Are Old Internet Explorer Files Safe to Delete? and
Is 205 megs of Free Hard Drive Space Enough?
Submitted by asourdough4
Q: My 1996 era PC came with a 1 GB Hard Drive. Later, I added a 2 GB HD - it became Drive "D". Drive "C" has become crowded, with some 205MB available. To increase this amount, several programs could be moved to "D".
At one time, I was successful in moving certain programs to "D". There were, however, a lot of files involved with IE4. IE5 has been on board since I installed Win 98SE but those IE4 files are still around.
Questions:
1. Is it safe to delete those IE4 files?
2. Is 205MB on "C" enough ?
A: Are those IE4 files in their own IE4 directory, separate from the current IE5 directory? Or are they still located in the same location as the IE5 files? I'm surprised they would still be left behind after an IE5 upgrade unless they were still in use, although you never know with such things.
One thing to check is the Add/Remove option in the Control Panel, and see if the list of installed programs has something like "Windows 98 Uninstall Information" or "Internet Explorer 5.0 Uninstall Information". If so, those IE4 files might be residing on your hard drive just in case you want to "roll back" your system to its prior configuration (with Windows 95, I would assume). In that case, you can safely "uninstall" that uninstall information, since it's just wasting space.
Be careful though, because if those IE4 files ARE still being used, removing them won't just disable IE5, but possibly your entire system as well since IE is so tightly integrated with the Windows 98 OS.
As far as your hard drive space is concerned, 205 megs free is still fine for most systems, but that's only a program installation or two away from becoming dangerously low. Assuming your Windows "virtual RAM" is being stored on drive C:, if Windows doesn't get enough free space for virtual RAM you'll get severely degraded performance, and maybe even system crashes.
To help prevent that, you'll probably want to move your virtual RAM (a.k.a. "swapfile") on your D: drive, which I assume is faster, newer, and has more free space. To do that, just right-click on My Computer, choose Properties, click the Performance tab, click "Virtual Memory", and choose "Let me specify my own virtual memory settings". Then choose D: for your hard disk and, if you want, put a "cap" on the minimum such as 200 megs (you might want to cap the maximum too; for more info, see my article on RAM at http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-4E4F-20DE767B-39ECDEBF-prod4 ). Not only will this give you much more usable space on C:, but it should speed up your system as well.
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Epinions.com ID:
vicwang
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Member: Vic Wang
Location: Texas
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 216 members
About Me:
Systems Analyst and all-around computer guru who's always keeping up with the latest technology.
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