@2{Die traitor DIE!!!!!! @3 }A Compelling Story on why Andy Smith bought a PC! @4 Last week, I did something I swore I would never ever do, not in a million years, buy a PC. After having sneered at all those PC owners calling them every single swear word under the sun, I spent my hard earned money on a Pentium. Aarrrggghhhh! Why on earth did I do it? Because they are just excellent value for money. Now lets look at the current situation. For a thousand pounds (yes, a thousand!) I got a Pentium PC, with 540 MB hard drive, high-density disk drive, CD-ROM, 16 bit Sound Card, Speakers, 8 megs of RAM, monitor and a mouse PLUS software. The top-end Amiga, the 4000T weighs in at a hefty £2,200! What do you get for this enourmous outlay? Well, not much. You get a gigabyte hard drive, 6 megs of RAM, err a keyboard and a nice big box. Oh yes, you also get a processor which is out of date. The 68040 that is used in the 4000T is comparable to a 486DX 25 which you can no longer buy. It's just not good enough. How can Amiga Technologies really expect to sell any when PCs are so many times more powerful than the most powerful Amiga? @4They can't, that's what! This new regime stinks just like the old Commodore. Hell, even most of the employees are ex-Commodore. History, they say, repeats itself. Let's work out now how much the 4000T SHOULD cost, taking the cost of the 1200 into consideration. The old 1200 retailed at £299. So, if we add a 68040 CPU to it, the price has jumped up £300. Next, we need extra memory, 6 megs of Fast RAM will take it up to 8 Megs. A 1 Megabyte SIMM costs £37.99 and we need six of them, so this makes £227.94. Next we need a gigabyte hard drive. Since the 4000 accepts 3.5 inch versions, our Amiga will as well. The gig hard drive knocks the price up another £200. Next, we need a monitor. A multisync capable of displaying all Amiga modes. The Microvitec is the most suitable, this sets us back another £274.99. Next, we need a big box to fit all our accessories, looking through the PC mags this should cost another £100. A keyboard is also needed, which costs £50. @4 Finally, we need some speakers for our sound, I'll chose the Aiwa computer speakers which cost another £60. So, then, lets add this up. @3 Old 1200 £299 68040 CPU £300 Memory £227.94 Hard drive £200 Monitor £274.99 Tower casing £100 Keyboard £50 Speakers £60 ========================= £1511.93 @4 Our final price as you can see is £1511.93. A damn site cheaper than the offering from Amiga Technologies. Although it is much cheaper, you can still see that it is very expensive compared to PCs. Also, this is nowhere near as powerful as the Pentium I have sitting on my desk at home. Do you understand why I bought one yet? Basically I needed a PC to do my work on at uni, plus I wanted to play all those excellent PC games! All this probably makes me sound like I'm very anti-Amiga. Not so! @4 The user-base of the PC may be vast, but there's just no creativity on the PC like there is on the Amiga. I don't know ANY PC owners that write music, draw graphics, program or do anything remotely creative. All these resources the PC has such as 8 megs of memory and vast hard drive space, it needs. Windows 95 will not run with anything less than 8 megs plus it needs loads of hard disk space for virtual memory. The Amiga is a much more streamlined machine, plus it has AMOS, which the PC doesn't have! So the next time a PC owner sneers at you for being an Amiga owner, sneer back at how ineffecient and crap Windows/PCs are and laugh at how much money they have to pay for software. Bugger! I'll have to spend loads of money as well! @1;-) Andy (Victor) Smith. @5 Yeah Andy, thanx for all that! How the F**K did you manage to afford a PC on yer uni grants? I would love to buy a PC also to marvel at those great games, but to be honest, everything I've ever wanted to do, can be done on my trusty Amiga. I have worked with an A4000/040 with 16 meg and a couple of HD's before with Videoworld multi-media. One of our jobs was to run a multi-media script using Scala for Motorola in East Kilbride. @5The whole project was created on the A4000 which included scanning pics of the Motorola staff using VLab and running a Scala script to show the pics and play music (at a very high sample rate) Not only that, but a VCR had to be controlled also to display video footage, and to stop interferance, we had to use a Genloc and Decoder. It wasn't easy to put the whole multi-media show together, but in the end, the whole thing ran very smoothly indeed. The whole thing was run from an A1200 (believe it or not), to keep the hire cost down. Now tell me this, how much of this would have been possible at the low price using a PC. (By the way, the A4000 was only used to put the whole thing into operation, mainly for speed - an A1200 with an accelarator would have done the same job)! So basically all that was required was an A1200, HD, Mem, Scala, Digitizer, Sampler, Genloc and VCR. Running the whole script for 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week for a few weeks. @5I'm sure you can imagine the probs getting all the timing right, like rewinding the video to certain parts, playing it, popping up scala stuff etc. all from a script! Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a PC could do all the above too, but at what cost? Motorola insisted that we use the Amiga. After all, they know how good and reliable the trusty Amiga is at multi-media presentations. I hate people that buy a computer to only play games. I especially hate those people that think the A1200 is a silly games computer. The truth is that the A1200 is a very capable machine when it comes to multi-media. It may not have all the power of a PC, but do we need that sort of power? I think not (well, maybe if you wanna play DOOM N Shit!) A funny thing the PC. My mate bought a brand new 486 PC and eventually bought a CD Rom Drive and a sound card etc. (after selling his A1200). Now, he says to me "At least when a new PC is released, all I have to do is upgrade my chip! No more selling my old Amiga to buy a whole new machine!" (referring to the many Amiga's he had owned) @5He only had his PC for about 2 months (remember it must have cost a total of £1500) and what does he do? Sells it for £600 Why? Becuase he wanted the latest PC Pentium (or whatever he was going on about, I dunno) Now, I'm not into PC's, nor do I know the first thing about 'em, but why did he have to sell his new machine to upgrade ? Buggered if I know! I thought it was only a matter of replacing a certain chip inside the machine? So Andy Smith, what will you do? Let me know as I am interested to learn the pro's and con's! My mate has put me off buying a PC. I don't fancy spending £1500 only to find out that I need to sell it for less than half the price and fork out double that to upgrade!!! Basically my mate has spent a fortune in the last three months to keep up-to-date! By the way, he only bought his PC cause he didn't have enough mem on his A1200 to use Imagine and other 3-D pacakges! Surely he would have been cheaper upgrading his A1200? (taking into consideration the price of 3D software on the PC) If anyone else knows of a sad git that sold their A1200 to buy a PC, and regrets it - write in. Andy Gibson @1End.