Kwanhaeng

Many drops of water make a river. Write to Kwanhaeng at kwanhaeng@radsoft.net.

Get the best crap you can and use more of it.

I have an old TV card, bought it a couple of weeks ago, Aims Video Xtreme something, company's out of business, it's a few years old. Second hand from a friend. The cover plate got bent, went to replace it, no one has it, got a new one, compusa, Hauppage Wingo something, maybe same co. with a new name, both UK. $23 with rebate day after Thanksgiving.

Looking at both, old one has FM Radio, new one does not. Old one has 6 places to plug in this or that, new one has 3. Old one requires 16MB RAM, new one 64. Lots more electronics on the old one. Much smaller install files.

I am making a new cover plate for the old one. It's a pain in the neck without a drill press or a bench bender. Meantime running the new one, which won't give quite a full screen, probably due to forcing 'primary mode' on account of excessive RAM requirement.

Very sneaky obfuscation on the packaging on the new one as well with respect to different models.

I know people who are still running 166's or 333's even by companies that never had good reputations; they don't have as much trouble as people getting this year's crop - none in fact, as long as they don't change anything.

Other people I know spend $3000-$7000 building their own from Taiwanese kits, more like a Ratalac than a Rolls, but the best AMD and Taiwan can offer. They tend to run XP Pro. Big power supplies, 2 gigs RAM and room for more, 8 fans, that sort of thing. The SUV philosophy applied to computers: Get the best crap you can and use more of it - a lot more.

Computer hardware appears to be lame and getting lamer. And what can be done when the primary manufacturers basically control all of that as far as components go? It is the same thing that happened with the automotive industry. You can still get a good car, but it costs a lot. And even a good car no longer has particularly good steel compared to twenty years ago.

Sometimes somebody new comes along, and you can get a relative bargain while they are still looking for market share. Once they have it, there is the inevitable peak and decline.

Yes, there could be money in building a better mousetrap, but one is still dependent on and at the mercy of the primary manufacturers. And it is an encyclopedic realm of which chip from which batch in which factory in which country from which month is the hottie and which is the nottie. And it keeps changing. And the people who know don't generally like to tell, although they will sell you anything.

I suppose something good could happen if one found a small assembler with great integrity already in business, but the ones I have talked to just kind of shrug their shoulders. They make motherboards to order, they sell cases, new and used processors, second hand boxes, and good shells cheap. Something to put your old peripherals in when old Betsy finally heads for the last roundup. And fixing whatever anybody brings in.

Those are the pros. The others are kids who either build from kits or just get parts, slap 'em together and sell 'em with a year guarantee to anyone who will buy from them. With the big guys getting so cheap, it gets harder for them to stay in business. They don't have volume, they can't compete with Wal-Mart on the low end or the pros on the high end: They are lucky if they can sell a couple a month.