Hardware

Let’s pretty much accept it that anything that I have to say about hardware is subject to change.

It’s AMD vs. Intel in a constant game of one-upmanship. We’ve come a long way from the old 8080 processor that I started out on. Now it’s all about gigahertz, single/dual cores, and who knows where we’ll be in 6 months. Best advice? Find what works for you now and will hopefully keep you up and running for a couple of years.

It’s also ATI vs. nVidia in another game of one-upmanship. Every few weeks one of them manages to squeeze out a couple more frames per second than the competition. Again, find what works for you right now, although you might plan on upgrading your card in a year or so if you’re an avid gamer.

Hard drives are becoming larger and faster as the major companies try to satisfy our cravings for ever-increasing amounts of storage space to hold our videos, photos, pictures, games, and assorted junk. Best advice is to buy as big as you can afford.

Memory? Don’t even get me started. As Bill Gates once observed, 640K should be enough for anyone. With Vista due out in a matter of a few weeks, 640MB probably won’t be enough. DRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3? Buy what your system will support and as much of it as you can afford.

As for the rest, what I knew last week is already obsolete.