IF YOU'RE GETTING A PC (spit)

                          by Chris Evans


Well  sub-ed  Andy Smith and a few other traitors are talking about
their PC's, so I thought I'd pass along the latest on what features
are  hot and what's dead.  These are mostly taken from PC World and
PC Computing.

                            LOCAL BUS

VESA  local  bus  has been declared dead as of last summer, and PCI
bus has won the war, just like VHS beating Beta VCR's.  All the new
peripherals are now PCI, so make sure you have several PCI slots.

                               CPU

As  recently  as  early fall the minimum recommended CPU was a 486-
DX4-100,  which  will still render faster than a 4000, but with the
tons  of  new 32 bit apps they've upgraded the minimum to a Pentium
75.   The  Pentium  prices are crashing because the new Pentium Pro
(sometimes  called  the  P6) systems are shipping, and Pentium 75's
are well under 1000 UKP.  A Pentium 100 is about another 100 UKP.

With  lots of 32 bit apps coming now, the Pentium's problem is that
it  doesn't  have  features  like  speculative execution, renamable
registers,   and  multiple-instruction  execution,  which  the  new
Pentium  Pro has.  Pentiums are CISC, with 2 instructions per clock
cycle.  Pentium Pros have these improvements:

- dual 64-bit PCI data bus (faster than Pentium caches)
- 36-bit address bus
- built-in (faster) L2 caches
- supersccalar pipelining (similar to RISC)
- multiprocessor - can work by itself or with up to 3 more Pro's.


The  competition  for the regular Pentium is AMD's K5 chip, Cyrix's
M1,  and  NexGen's  Nx586.   There  is currently no competition for
Intel's  Pentium  Pro.  Pro's have been 133 Mhz, but now the 200Mhz
are arriving in stores.

                               RAM

Minimum  8 MB, and you can use RAM compression software such as RAM
Doubler  or  Hurricane  (don't  use  SoftRAM  ..   it's  a scam) to
compress that into 16 MB.  And try to get the new 10-20% faster EDO
RAM if available.

                            WINDOZE 95

There's  one  large  reason  for  running  WIN  95, the Plug n Play
feature.    The   ridiculous  hassle  with  PC's  has  always  been
configuring   peripherals  ...   conflicting  TSR's  and  IRQ's,  a
nightmare.  PnP automatically detects you equipment and configs it.

The  mags  tested  hundreds  of  peripherals, everything from video
boards to CD-ROM's, and found PnP works great, but only if you have
all  3  components:   WIN 95, a PnP peripheral, and a PnP BIOS (and
motherboard).  So don't buy anything that doesn't have the PnP logo
on it.

                              BIOS

The  new  better  BIOSs are Flash, which means they can be upgraded
from  floppy,  just run the upgrade disk whenever upgrades come out
and  you're  done  ...  no more manual settings.  And make sure the
BIOS is PnP for auto config'ing your system.

                             CD-ROM

Double  speed  is  dead, 4 speed is now standard, at about 100 UKP.
Again,  get  a PnP model, no real-time drivers.  And if you want to
play  music  CD's on it, it's good to have front controls on it for
that ...  volume etc.

                           HARD DRIVE

Don't  get  a  HD smaller than 830 MB, and the 1 GB's are now quite
cheap, here about 150 UKP.  Many games take about 40 MB.  MS Visual
C++ takes 120 MB.  WIN 95 takes about 60 MB.  She fills up fast.

                          BUT REMEMBER

PC's  become obsolete every 2 years, unlike the Amiga.  Just think,
the  A500  came out at the same time as the 286's, and the 500 will
still  run  most  software,  while  the  286 is useless for today's
software, and even the 386 won't run alot of it.

The  Pentium  will  no  doubt  be fine for several years, but after
that,  who  knows?   No  one that I've ever talked to has regretted
buying  an  Amiga,  but  there are lots of PC's gathering dust.  If
Amiga development died tomorrow, most of us have enough software to
keep busy for years to come.

Chris Evans