What's new in the fast-developing PC world?

What's new in the fast-developing PC world?

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): It seems that soon we may no longer be able to
measure time based on the conventional systems, such as hours,
days, weeks, months and years. Because of the speed at which
information technology advances, we may have to measure time in
terms of "Internet-years" in the not so distant future.

Just think about it. Less than three years ago, Indonesian
students studying at University of Hawaii, Manoa, read Kompas two
weeks later than those studying in Jakarta. It usually took the
newspaper about that much time to reach the newspaper hanger in
the university's Hamilton Library. Today, thanks to the Internet
and Kompas On-line, they can read the same news we read here in
Jakarta, even a couple of hours earlier than we do.

Indeed, that's the kind of life in the information industry.
Fast-paced and highly competitive, and I'm just one of those who
have gotten caught in the middle of it all. Each time I stay away
too long from the "Computer City" in Glodok, West Jakarta, I am
bewildered by all the new products that suddenly become available
when I resume my regular visits.

And here are a few of the new products that I think you might
be interested in knowing about.

CD-Changer

Several weeks ago, I came across a CD-ROM drive that could
hold four CDs at the same time. The price was Rp 375,000 (it's
now down to about Rp 350,000). I was excited, so I bought it
right away. I had been wanting to replace my very old Sony CDU
33A with a changer so that I would no longer have to keep
swapping CD-ROMs each time I wanted to do something else. With a
changer, for instance, I could insert my favorite American
Heritage Dictionary CD-ROM, Worldbook Encyclopedia (which came in
two CDs) and leave them there. Then I would still have a free
slot for an audio CD.

The six-speed drive I came across was made in the Philippines
by NEC. It was an OEM product, so you'd have to make some effort
to find the name NEC on its label. Although we can feed four CDs
into it, there's only one lid that opens and shuts as we push any
of the four buttons. When a slot is filled, the green light next
to the button will be on. There's no CD tray, so we have to be a
little bit careful when inserting and pulling out the disks. If
everything works, Win95 will assign four different drive letters
to this CD-changer. In other words, you'll have drives D:, E:,
F:, and G: as CD-ROM drives.

Incidentally, this is exactly the CD-ROM changer you'll get if
you buy the new Compaq Presario 3060, the one that comes with the
LCD monitor. If you want to have more CDs available on your PC at
the same time, you can buy a CD-changer from TEAC. With the
ability to hold six CDs at the same time, it costs about Rp
450,000 in Glodok.

Be forewarned, though. If you buy one of these CD-changers, be
sure to get the necessary software driver for your Windows 95.
While many PCs can immediately recognize all the extra drives on
the hardware level, some -- including my own PC -- require a
driver in order to enable Win95 to recognize all the additional
drives. In my case, I had to wait until a friend in Orion Plaza
gave me a universal IDE CD-Changer driver in a file named
CDCHANGER.EXE before I was able to make use of all four drives.

One drawback in using a CD-changer is that opening Windows
Explorer will now take some time as the operating system will
read each of the drives first. Also, don't expect you can play
audio CD and look up the CD-ROM-based thesaurus at the same time,
because the drive will be shuffling disks like crazy and it will
just slow your work. If you plan to use the CD-ROM dictionary, it
will make more sense to just turn off the music.

A3 in Color

Finally, it's arrived. Almost two years after I had asked the
HP people for an A3-size DeskJet printer, they launched their new
DeskJet 1000Cxi Professional Series. This printer prints
beautiful colors on paper twice as wide as the letter size (up to
13 inches by 19 inches). This allows us to print four-page
leaflets, brochures and handouts without having to staple the
pages.

A notable feature is the ZoomSmart capability. It allows us to
enlarge or shrink the size of a bitmap image without really
sacrificing the quality. In addition, The Billboard feature makes
it easy for us to create large posters. Both black text and color
graphics print at 600 by 600 DPI. The printer can print both
sides, and it also comes with a CD-ROM containing communication
tools for business professionals.

Print speed is not bad. Black text can be printed at the speed
of 6 pages per minute, while color graphics can be printed at 3.5
pages per minute. Well, of course, for the highest quality
printout you will need more time. By the way, it can also print a
mirror image, so that you can use it to print graphics on a
special type of material and iron it on to your T-Shirt.

Five Gigas

I remember the first time I had a 2-GB hard disk. It was made
by Micropolis, the maker of very high-end hard disk. The price
was a staggering Rp 2 million. Today, a 5-GB hard disk from the
same maker costs only US$400.

The Mustang 4550A from Micropolis has a 16.6 bit per second
transfer rate and 10.5 seek time. Fast hard disk spins at higher
speed, and this one spins at 5200 rpm. If you prefer the SCSI
version, the new Stinger 5400 rpm from the same maker offers up
to 4.3 GB of storage space.

If you work with audio and video materials, you will need one
of these hard disks. For everyday business activities, however,
these hard disks are a bit too pricey. In general, the price of
the hard disks have gone further down. In Glodok, a Fujitsu hard
disk with 2.5 GB capacity can be had for less than Rp 500,000
nowadays.

DesignJet

Do you want to print a large banner for your corporate
function? Or do you want to create your own wallpaper? Then you
will need what HP calls 'large format printer.'

Two new printers in this category from HP are DesignJet 2500CP
and 2000CP. While they can be used as perfect replacement for CAD
and CAM plotters, they can also be used to produce large photo-
quality posters. You can buy one of these printers, provide
printing services and enjoy a good business. Still, you don't
really have to be a service provider to need a large format
printer such as these ones. My friend Rene from Kompas, for
instance, uses a DeskJet for printing presentation materials for
his lectures.

Interesting features of DeskJet 2500CP and 2000CP include
support for Asian languages in Taiwan, Korea and Japan. A 2 GB
hard disk, an Ethernet connection, some extra memory and Adobe
Postscript Level 2 RIP are also included.

All-in-one

The Compaq Presario notebook was one of the first notebooks
that claimed to have everything integrated. What they meant was
that the notebook, unlike its predecessors, had both the CD-ROM
and the floppy diskette drives built-in. Older notebooks usually
allow you to have one or the other built-in. If you happen to
need both, one of them should be connected to the notebook as an
external peripheral. This would mean additional weight and
clutter in your briefcase.

IBM has launched its response to the new trend. In fact, the
new ThinkPad 380D has already won an award from Windows Magazine.
Its floppy diskette drive is placed right on top of the CD-ROM
drive. It's a very nice machine, with the traditional ThinkPad
black, velvet-like casing and good performance. The design
follows my favorite ThinkPad 560, complete with sufficient palm
rest for those of us who are used to touch typing. Other features
are as good as you would expect from a ThinkPad. The only
drawback I found in ThinkPad 380 is that it is significantly
thicker than other notebooks.

ThinkPad 380 also reflects how being an inventor could hamper
further advances. The new ThinkPad 380 still uses the TrackPoint,
the pointing device patented by IBM. Today, most users including
myself have found the touch pad more convenient to use. But,
since IBM was the inventor of the TrackPoint, it seems hard for
them to abandon it and adopt the increasingly popular touch pad.

One possible solution is actually to provide both the
TrackPoint and the touch pad on the notebook, just like in Micron
Transport. Incidentally, a friend called me after reading my
recent review of Transport and reminded me that we could choose
whether to use its pointing stick or the touch pad by going into
its BIOS setup. Perhaps future ThinkPads could learn one thing
from Transport.