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Updated 8/24/99

Buy

Sony VAIO

Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95

PCAnywhere

AMD K6

Windows CE

Don't Buy

Oil Change

SuperFasst!

Sony VAIO

Written 1/10/97

Note: While the below is very out of date in terms of specs, the design philosophy and the generous price/performance ratio continues with the latest round of Sony's machines.

Sony Corporation came out strong with a great new computer this year, that's currently priced bargain cheap because of the MMX blitz.

The specs:

The specs put it at the current high end home consumer, but what tips the balance is the amazing price. As of 3/15/97, you can buy this machine for $1500 at CompUSA. This is just about all the machine anyone needs, and is certainly the best deal on the market until Klamath shows up. But in addition to high end specs and low end price, Sony has really paid attention to detail.

The machine is whipping fast. I'm sure you can find something even faster, but nothing that you'll be able to see with the naked eye.

In terms of testimonial, both my mother and Paul Canniff have purchased a Sony. They're about as far apart on the computer spectrum as they can be (my Mother's only really started using a Windows computer about a year ago, Paul's a nine year Microsoft vet) and neither have been disappointed.

Of course, the inevitable question is "what about MMX?" Well, MMX is more of a marketing campaign than a technology. How many games are coming out with MMX? 2, 3? How many for Direct3D? 20, 30? Of course, MMX can be used for other technologies (like video compression) but for all the buzz, MMX provides only minimal performance improvements. The real work comes from a better cache that's included with MMX machines. Is it worth money? Sure. Is it worth 600 more? Nope!!

At this price, do yourself a favor and buy this machine before they're all gone.

Norton Utilities 3.0 for Windows 95

Written 2/15/98

Norton Utilities is a mainstay in PC history. It's a collection of utilities that help keep your computer running smoothly, or rescue it when it goes down. And if you don't care about your computer crashing or losing data, why do you have a computer in the first place?

Norton Utilities comes with a lot of great utilities. Norton Disk Doctor is probably the most important utility, since it's the one that can diagnose and fix your broken machine, but my favorite is Speed Disk, which does a much better job than the version that comes with Windows 95. Speed Disk works with FAT32 (bought a machine in the last six months? You've got FAT32!), and also arranges programs on the hard drive according to use, so that the more often a program is used, the closer it is to the front of the drive. That results in significant speed improvements when launching programs. There's lots of others, but you can generally assume that if you need a utility, it's there.

One of the cool new things about Norton Utilities is the System Doctor. This lets you run a group of sensors in the background while you use your machine. These sensors can check up on your machine as you go, and automatically fix problems when they find them. For example, there's a sensor to check your hard drive integrity. If it goes bad, the sensor can automatically fire up Norton Disk Doctor to take care of it. All this can happen at 3am, while you're snug in your bed.

Norton also takes advantage of the Internet via LiveUpdate, which is essentially Oil Change exclusively for Norton products. And, having noticed that LiveUpdate is a lot like Oil Change, Norton now has a web subscription service where you can download updates for your computer, much like Oil Change. Unlike Oil Change, Norton had a number of updates available that Oil Change had never seen. The service is free for the first six months, after which it's something like 24 bucks a year.

The bottom line is everyone needs a product like Norton Utilities for when things go wrong, and Norton Utilities is the best product in this category. Pick it up today (and I strongly recommend you follow the emergency disks procedure).

Warning: After having read the above, you should know that Norton recently took a serious misstep. The initial version could (and did) destroy the Windows registry, which effectively destroys your Windows installation. While a number of patches have been released to avoid this problem, I'd recommend you avoid optimizing your registry (Norton will always ask before it ever does this).

Caveat: A lot of Norton's improvements for 3.0 are built into Windows 98, and so far (based upon my anecdotal usage) seem to work about as well as Norton. However, traditionally, Norton has been in this position before and always winds up providing significant enhancements on the Microsoft version. This only makes sense, as Microsoft is interested in providing a bare bones utility, and leaves it to others to productize, but if all you want is the basic functionality of Norton, you may simply want to use the tools provided with Windows instead of getting into Norton.

PCAnywhere

Written 2/15/98

This is a critical program to have if you've got a geeky friend who can help with computer problems, but they're far away. For any of my friends, it's a mandatory buy, especially since I live across the country from most of them.

PCAnywhere allows one computer to call in to another computer via the modem and take control of that other computer. By "take control," I mean that the calling computer (which we'll call the Guest) sees the receiving computer's (which we'll call the Host) display. Anything that the caller does inside that display is done locally on the Host machine.

Why is this cool? Here's an example: My Mom has a problem with her new sound card. It's a plug and play card, but it's not playing any sounds. She tells me about the problem, I suspect it's an IRQ conflict. I call into her computer with PCAnywhere, and suddenly I'm looking at her display on my machine! I start the control panel, open up the System, look for conflicts, find one, and change the IRQ settings on the appropriate card. Meanwhile, my Mom has watched her mouse pointer zip around doing all this stuff.

It's night and day in how well it lets me help my friends. Gone forever is the agony of this conversation:

"Double click on the top left toolbar button"

"I don't see it"

"Sure you do, it's on the left of the top part of the program's window."

"Where's that?"

"Do you see a blue bar with the words Microsoft Word anywhere?"

"No, oh, wait, yes."

"Ok, do you see the button?"

"What button?"

And so on, and so on, and so on....

PCAnywhere does tons of other stuff. It lets network administrators control their users' machines via the LAN, it has security, it does all sorts of stuff that you really don't care about, otherwise you're probably reading more reputable reviews than mine. However, in terms of letting me support my friends, it's absolutely essential.

AMD K6

Written 8/7/97

I just recently replace my old Micron Pentium 120. It's been a great computer, and I've been very happy with it, but I found another good use for it, and frankly, the processor was starting to show its age. I initially shopped around for the usual high end (Pentium II 233 or 266) but then, on a recommendation from a friend, I decided to try the K6 233. The difference in price between a K6 233 and a Pentium II 266 was supposed to be less than 10% for real world applications, and the initial reports of AGP convinced me to wait until another couple of iterations by Intel. The K6 233 turned out to be about 700 bucks cheaper than a Pentium II 233 (the K6 doesn't require the more expensive motherboard required for the Pentium II) and since the total cost for the machine was between 1500 and 2000, that's a significant savings.

After I got the new machine, I had a lot of strange problems. All of them were because of the new motherboard (ASSUS TX-97 DIMM) or because I was installing things in a new order than I usually had before, and had run into some strange little software problems (the CD-ROM recording software I have caused the whole system to freeze every 2 seconds until I turned off auto-insert notification to my CD-ROM recorder). Of course, as often as my machine crashes because of all the pre-release software I run, I was terrified to throw yet another variable into the stew, so I watched all my applications like a hawk

Here's what I've found so far:

1. The K6 seems to be 100% compatible with the Pentium. I haven't had any chip related problems yet. I run a lot of programs, including a lot of pre-release stuff. I haven't seen anything that's barfed on the chip.
2. The chip is pretty fast, and seems to live it up to its "near Pentium II" performance claims.
3. The floating point processor on the K6 is a dog, making it about half to a third that of a Pentium II for FPU operations. This is relevant to me because I like to use Lightwave 3D, a 3D rendering package which makes extensive use of FPU. Additionally, some games are starting to make use of the FPU, although I believe it's still a small number.

Based on the above, I have to give a hearty thumbs up to the mighty K6. It's a great chip for a great price, and I think AMD has finally hit upon the right chip to take on Intel. One note about buying Intel chips: It almost never pays to get the fastest thing out there. You pay through the nose for it, and the performance gains per dollar value are generally poor (the 300 is a mighty 5% faster than the 266, for a lot more money). Once I had decided not to go for the absolute fastest chip, the K6 became the obvious chip to go for.

Of course, Intel just recently announced the 900mhz Merced, so the K6's moment in the sun may be brief, but I've also heard rumours AMD has some amazing leap forward in the works, so we'll see. :-)

Windows CE Device Review

Written 1/23/98

Preface: The following is a long newsgroup review that I did comparing and contrasting the HP 620 LX and the Sharp Mobilon 4500. Both are extremely good CE devices.

Initial Comments (I've only had a couple of hours to play with it)

Conclusions:

I definitely like the Sharp better. While the difference between them isn't extreme on any single point, the Sharp does enough things better that I have to give the nod to them. However, the HP is an extremely well made unit, and I've thoroughly enjoyed using the HP. But if I were forced to buy one unit and use it for the rest of my life, it'd be the Sharp.

But of course there will be a CE 3.0, and a 4.0, and the devices released next year will be even better. I firmly expect to upgrade within 2 years. Given that, the cost difference between the two becomes more interesting to me. And the cost difference between the two units far outweighs the difference in quality. If the Sharp came with lithium batteries and a docking station, I think it'd be worth the extra 100 bucks. But it doesn't. It doesn't come with the docking station (extra $150), it doesn't come with lithiums even as an option. While I'm sure it's a well designed unit in terms of power consumption, the experience I've had with the differences between lithium and nickel make me go lithium whenever I get the chance. So, we're talking a difference of about 200 dollars: you can get an HP $800 mail ordered, extra $150 for a PCMCIA modem, vs. the $1000 Sharp with an extra $150 for the docking station. And for all that, you still don't have lithium batteries for the Sharp. As one of my friends who was looking at both units said, "It's a nice speaker. Is it a 200 dollar speaker?"

Either way, though, you really can't go wrong with either one of these units. I'm amazed at the progress Windows CE has made, and how much better these units are than last years. I can't wait to see what we're using by 2000!

Oil Change

Written 11/22/97

Previously, Oil Change was on my recommended page. Check out the original review I gave it. However, since that time, I've become extremely disappointed with the product.

Oil Change scans your computer to see what drivers and programs you have, and then checks its database on the Internet to see if there's any updates. If there is, Oil Change will download the update for you and even sometimes install it automatically. It's great that you don't have to 1) know where the updates are and, even better, 2) don't have to go up on a regular basis to check for updates. It's a great idea for a product.

But over the last year that I've had it, I've run into more and more products that it doesn't know about. It doesn't have a clue about games, and it's started missing HUGE productivity apps. For example, Norton Utilities and Adobe Photoshop aren't exactly unknown applications. If I can't trust it to find those updates, that means I have to look for them myself, and most of the value is negated. There'd still be some value if it was getting even half the updates, but it doesn't. The last time I ran an update it found one meaningful update (as opposed to all the "new Excel templates" crap that it likes to recommend), and that was PCAnywhere. By looking for updates myself, I solved two major crashes and one major annoyance. Having the product in some ways is worse than not having the product, since it lulls you into thinking that you're just wasting your time looking for updates.

Here's the letter I sent to the management, to which I've never received a response.

When I first bought Oil Change, I was excited by the promise of not having to go looking for software updates myself. And when I first bought the product, it seemed to deliver on that promise, only missing a minor update or two.

But now I find that very few if any of the updates I’m looking for are actually found by Oil Change. Just recently, I ran into two fairly serious problems that were solved by updates, neither of which Oil Change was aware of. The first was a TWAIN update for UMAX scanners (not exactly an unknown brand), and the second was an update to Norton Utilities version 8.0! The first updated fixed some crashes, the second prevented error dialogs from pestering me through the session.

I can understand missing an update or two, but this is just the most serious of updates that Oil Change was unaware of. In addition to not having updates for other productivity software I have (Adobe Photoshop 4.01 patch, for instance) I’ve never seen Oil Change have an update for a game.

99% of the value of Oil Change is that I don’t have to manually look for updates myself. Of the 15-20 updates I’ve downloaded in the last four months, Oil Change has found exactly (1) of them. That’s pathetic.

I love the concept of Oil Change, and thought it was a great product early on. So much so, that I purchased First Aid largely on the strength of that reputation. Since First Aid also relies upon your company actively searching the web for problem reports and fixes, I’m dubious as to whether I’m going to get any real value out of it. Unless I see a rapid improvement in the product, I’m not going to renew my subscription to Oil Change, and will recommend against buying it to my friends. I really hope that you can address this concern, as I would like to be a future customer.

Definitely not recommended.

SuperFasst!

I first heard about Acceleration Software, the maker's of Superfasst!, by purchasing another product of theirs, D-Time. D-Time was a CD-ROM accelerator that worked by making a cache on your hard drive that it could fill with frequently accessed sections of your CD-ROM. I tried it out for a while, and it seems to work ok. Also, the company supplied patches every once in a while (the most recent enables FAT-32 support) so I had a reasonably good feeling for the company and its products.

Then I came across Jerry Pournelle's BYTE magazine article where he talked about seeing SuperFasst! at Comdex, tried it out on his machine, and it worked amazing well, launching applications about 80% faster than usual. On the strength of this recommendation, and based upon my previous good experience with the company, I went ahead and ordered the full copy directly from the company (they also have a slightly pared down version in retail stores) and installed it on my home machine and my work machine.

The program works by installing an icon on your desktop that you can drag icons to for SuperFasst to analyze and create a new link that will launch the program much faster. The update that I had could do this for you automatically for any program that launched out of the Start menu bar. It had the annoying habit of renaming the link (so Microsoft Word becomes Microsoft Word (SuperFasst!) but otherwise it seemed to work ok. After it had launched the program once, everytime you launched it after that the startup time would be faster. Also, the program claimed that it could dramatically accelerate multitasking as well. How it could do all these things, the program didn't say. It hinted at a couple of things that sounded reasonable (pre-caching critical pieces, enhancements to Windows disk subsystem, etc.) but kept the specifics of how it could get amazing results a "trade secret".

The good news: It seems to co-exist with most things, and I never saw a crash that I could directly relate to it, so it seems to be stable. The bad news: I have never been able to measure any perceptible increase in speed in launching programs or multitasking. After seeing no noticeable change, I finally downloaded the company's recommendations on how to measure performance, and tried it out. The results are at the end of this section.  Superfasst did speed up Word perceptibly, halving the launch time from 4 to 2 seconds, but in the other apps it didn't make much of a difference or, in fact, slowed things down. Given the large number of subsystems that Word loads, I suspect that the same difference in speed could result from simply grouping the subsystems sequentially on the hard drive (something that neither Nortong SpeedDisk or Windows' Disk Defragmentor do. The next version of Windows, however, will have a smarter Disk Defragmentor that will watch your app load and then organize it correctly on the hard drive.

One interesting note: Superfasst's deviation was much smaller than vanilla Windows. I'm not sure what that signifies, but there it is.

So, yes, Superfasst is doing something, but boy, it doesn't feel like much. And out of the three apps I tested, it only made a positive difference on one. I was expecting a little more when I paid my seventy bucks (I bought it direct).

When I filled out my registration card, I complained about the lack of substantive difference. To their credit, the company called me and asked if they could help. I told them my situation, and they promised to look into it and call back. They never did, but neither did I try and nudge them by calling them. Every time I've spoken to a company representative, they've seemed knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful. Also, they're confident enough to make SuperFasst! available as a demo, so if you're interested, go to their web page and check it out. Make sure you run timings on your system before you install the demo.

Numbers

Work Machine: Dell Optiplex 166 mhz, 32 megs of RAM, Fast SCSI 2 HD. Running Windows OSR/2.