The mystery of the $299 PC
Thousands of letters and only room for a couple but let’s get right to it.
Q. I have been watching PC prices for a long time and usually build my own computers to save money. But given what is going on now, I don’t see that happening from now on. I know you build yours, how is that measuring up in your opinion?
A. You’ve about got it. We’re at a unique situation in the computing world where the sum of the parts exceed the cost of the product thanks to intense price competition and volume pricing. In my MBA class we called this a “perfect storm” of retailing. Consider an ad I saw last week from Dell. (This is not an endorsement, but a discussion.) The company was offering a Windows XP desktop system for $299. If we consider that for a moment in the spirit of making your own PC: in round numbers including tax: a copy of Windows will run you $100. The computer case and power supply: $50. CD/DVD drive: $40. RAM module: $70. 80 gig hard drive: $70. Keyboard and mouse: $40. Various other software: $50. Monitor: $75. Motherboard and processor? $150.
(The fun thing is you used to have to factor in the value of the warranty; on the above ad the brand new computer came with no warranty coverage whatsoever.)
Of course, Dell and other retailers are not paying retail but you are. So you need to factor that in when you consider building your own. Also remember the above machine will run Windows and basic software fine but will choke to death on the latest version of Halo.
So it becomes a matter of specs again; pay close attention to the details of the system, not just the price.
Q. I keep getting all of these emails about my email account being suspended but they keep coming. My Internet company does not respond when I ask about them.
A. You have to think for a moment. If your email account had been suspended, would your ISP send you an email? Secondly, would you keep getting them? Thirdly, would your account still work? There’s a new virus going around that spoofs (fakes) the “from” field of the sender so it looks like it comes from someplace official.
Delete the emails unread and unopened.
If you already have opened and (shudder) executed the attachment, you want to run (not walk) to your anti-virus product and run a full scan. If you do not have an anti-virus product, go to free.grisoft.com and download AVG.
Then repeat after me, never open any attachments.
Q. What kind of protection do I need to turn on for my wireless router?
A. The first step is to change the default password. The second is to turn on encryption assuming you don’t want to share your connection. (Some people do…in some communities the goal is to leave everyone’s connection open so people can roam around a community and have access.) But assuming you want to keep people off your connection I find the easiest way is to turn on WEP encryption. You set up the router with a key and every one who connects need a key too. You also can go to www.lucidlink.com and download the home edition for free to protect your router.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: I am becoming more and more fond of the search engine Teoma. Although I use Google a lot, I find Teoma offers me a different set of returns which is very valuable. See it at www.teoma.com
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
Google rules the world
I have previously received some mail chiding me for my comment about Google’s attempt, in my opinion, to take over the world.
I meant the comment facetiously of course but the company really is firing on all cylinders when it comes to Internet “coolness,” products, ubiquity and stock price. I strongly admire the company’s resistance to plaster the company’s home page with ads and ruin the experience. (Compare Google’s home page with that of Yahoo or Netscape for example.)
Some people are worried about some of its products, including Desktop Search, which possibly could expose some personal information if used in certain ways, but overall the company is retaining most of the cache it had when it first launched and news of the plain web site with the funny name trickled out onto the Web.
Since then it has become the most important search site on the entire Web and revolutionized free email by offering every user up to a gig of email space, about 10 times what most competitors were offering.
Anyway, the company appears to be preparing to launch a personalized version of Google that will remember your searches, offer the status of your Gmail and more.) How would I know this? My vast network of spies?
No, actually Google is among the most transparent companies on the Internet with what it is working on. If you head to Google’s Lab (labs.google.com) you will see lots of very cool ideas.
Not only is there desktop search on the horizon, if I lived in a city I would be pretty happy with Google Ride Finder, which monitors the position of taxicabs via global positioning systems. (Of course, not every taxi is in the system but it is way-cool idea if it could be ported to a wireless device…imagine needing a cab and firing up a handheld and seeing where every available taxi is… or even hailing a cab by automatically dispatching the closest one to your location.)
The Web Acceleration technology has promise but some kinks to be worked out. As previously reported some users were reporting some privacy concerns and some problems working with some applications such as Firefox. I think acceleration technology is very promising but as the Lab site says, the application is not yet ready for prime-time.
Google Video, another product under development, searches the closed-captioning streams from television programs and makes them searchable. Eventually it hopes to have the rights to the actual video associated with the found text but as it stands (and as far as it goes) it is pretty cool. If you want to know anytime on any program that “Ernie Banks” was mentioned on television in the last 7 days, this type of application could tell you that, then show you the clip.
Like everything else there are rights issues that will take years to work out.
Anyway, take a look around the Google Laboratory and see what you like. There’s a feedback link once you have used the products (or, if you never want to, why you would not.) I at least get the impression the company is listening.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Want to search the web for pictures? Google’s Image search is first-rate. Head to images.google.com
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
Parents, watch the gaming ratings
In recent years, there have been many controversies about the violence, sex and other content issues in video games. It usually rears its head following a violent episode in real life and the investigation shows the teen perpetrator was a video game player.
However, parents like me now are faced with a real conundrum on the hard drives of our children because, unlike the movie industry, the gaming industry has done a lousy job of policing itself.
Consider the current crop of video games; recent titles have included slaughter of police officers, incredible amounts of sexual content, gang violence and more. One to be released next year, “Snow,” lets gamers set up their own criminal drug dealing enterprise. In another game, if your character uses cocaine the game speed increases. In another, you get to steal cars and shoot cops.
I am not a anti-gaming evangelist; in fact I enjoy playing games many would consider violent, including titles in the Doom, Quake and Halo series. However, I am well outside my teen-age years and I think I am pretty well entitled to make decisions on content for myself.
I agree that under the First Amendment, gaming companies can make games depicting what they want. I just think, unlike the movie industry, parents are not well-informed about what is in that content.
This is not a small problem. Consider that the video gaming industry is now a $10 billion business in the USA and growing faster than the movie business. And while many titles are voluntarily rated by the Entertainment Ratings Software Board (www.esrb.com), for the most part if your kid walks into a store with the cash, they can walk out with any title they want. (Not to mention online ordering, which has no age-checking at all.)
Because the industry self-policing is so awful, several states including Illinois, California and Maryland, are considering legislation to control the sales of games to minors. But, of course, like the kids buying the ticket to “Bambi” at the multiplex and sneaking into an R-rated movie, the various peer-to-peer downloading services offer any games to anyone.
So it falls to the parents to monitor their teens’ hard drives. Check the cases from the games and look for the ESRB rating, if any. (The ratings on the front will say C (early childhood), E (okay for everyone), E-10 Plus (Okay for ages 10 and up), T (okay for 13 and up), M (okay for 17 and up) and A (adults only).
On the back of the package you’ll see the black and white rating again with more information as to why the rating applies “Cartoon violence, mild language,” etc.
So find the boxes and see if that content matches what you want in your house. If you know what games your teens play, you can visit the ESRB ratings site above and type in the name of the game and check out what rating the game has and why.
And, of course, talking to your teen and discussing gaming is always the best choice.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: One of the best all-around gaming sites remains GameSpot at www.gamespot.com . If you’re a gamer or a parent, there’s lots here for you.
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email is jim@cyberdads.com
Rebates are a scam
Is anyone else fed up with the whole rebate scam when it comes to computers and computer parts? This has to be one area where an aggressive attorney general someplace will make a killing (and a career) defending consumers from this terrible practice.
Somewhere in the newspaper in which you are reading this column you will find an ad for a computer system that will read something like “$899 (minus $100 mail-in rebate, minus $150 mail-in bonus bucks, minus $50 check…etc) making the final cost about a buck ninety-five.
Of course, various studies have shown only about 15 percent of people actually fully comply with the ridiculous requirements for the rebates and mail the things in by the deadline. Then, of course, only a certain percentage of the checks actually make it back to the consumer. (Many of the checks, amazingly, are sent as postcards and I have no idea now many of these actually make it to the consumer.)
So let’s break this down. You buy a PC, a monitor and a printer. There are five rebates to five different places; you need five photocopies of the receipt; you need the UPC codes from five of the boxes (wait, you threw the printer box away?) and the serial numbers from everything. In two cases you need photocopies of the UPC codes.
Of course, you need photocopies of everything you mailed along with proof that you mailed it. (Wait, you didn’t send the rebates via certified mail?) So after 10 weeks, assuming you even remember that you are still missing the $50 receipt from the printer company, you have to figure out who to call, write or track down for the fifty large.
What most people do is forget about it.
I get hundreds of letters a year from people complaining about rebates wondering why HP, Dell or whoever just doesn’t reduce the price of the computer to $499 or whatever and reduce all of the hoops we have to jump through. Here’s why.
Rebates impact our buying decisions but companies are counting on us being terrible at filling them out correctly and mailing them in on time. (One of my Best Buy rebates gave me a whopping two days to have the entire thing done, and mailed.) In other words, when your budget is $800 for a PC, you’ll spend $1,000 if the rebates bring it down to $800. Mentally you consider that a $800 PC…then you forget to mail in the stuff (or the PC company’s rebate fulfillment house “forgets” to mail you the check.) They keep the extra $200.
The time has come to stop the madness and just give us the money.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: The Web site Consumer Affairs (
www.consumeraffairs.com) will alert you to consumer issues on the Web and elsewhere and give you a forum for your comments.
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is
jim@cyberdads.com
Tiger hits a homer
The release of Apple’s OS X “Tiger” operating system upgrade last week didn’t make much of a blip outside of the Apple world. Granted, the Apple market share still hovers only around 5 percent so a new operating system may not be front page news.
But Tiger ought to be considered a shot across the bow of Microsoft, which still won’t release an upgrade to Windows XP for another 18 months. Considering the older Mac OS X operating system was already better than Windows, this new version should do two things; attract more people to the Apple platform and/or encourage Microsoft to add more features to the next version of Windows, called “Longhorn.”
What is so much better about Tiger? For one thing, it’s more secure. Nothing can be installed in Tiger without the user typing in the administrator password. It would seemingly be a good change to make in the current version of Windows, maybe via a patch, but few users today even have an administrative password.
How many times have you “lost” something on today’s cavernous hard drives? One of the coolest features of Tiger is built-in desktop search. Called “Spotlight,” the program is the first integrated search application that does a great job of indexing a hard drive and everything on it…every email, every word of every document, every Excel sheet.
It works much better than any add-on product because it is built in to the operating system and part of the indexing system.
Another new feature, Dashboard, puts the most used features right on the desktop. And, most importantly, Apple has trumped Microsoft again by building parental controls right into the operating system, which help control what your kids can do with your home PC.
A feature called “Smart Folders” is amazingly slick. You can consider them saved searches…if you set up a search about a topic then any document or photo that you later create or receive on that topic will be added to that folder.
Windows is planning a similar thing. We shall see who does it better but with an 18-month head-start I will bet on Apple.
Apple’s Web browser, Safari, already was pretty slick. The new version adds a “private browsing” option which does not save traces of where you have browsed on the Internet. As the World Wide Web turns into the Wild West, that becomes very important.
If you’re into video conferencing, the new Tiger includes that, too.
You can add Tiger to a current Apple PC for $129; if you live near an Apple store they will even help you install it and learn how to use it. (Do you think Microsoft could learn a few things about customer service?)
If you order or buy a new Apple in the next few months, make sure the PC comes with Tiger in case the retailer has older stock. (If you order direct from Apple you’ll get Tiger.)
Anyway, this upgrade really raises the bar, again, for Microsoft which continues to ride the wave of a 90 percent market share. We shall see in 18 months if Windows can compete.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: If you’re a cheap nerd like me and watch every penny on the price of your components, check out PriceWatch before you buy (www.pricewatch.com/). It monitors the prices of thousands of key electronic components.
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
