On The Runway

Entrepreneur, Dec, 2000 by Mike Hogan

USB is already present on 99 percent of new PCs shipped, according to Cabners In-Stat Group, and peripherals-makers are starting to catch up. In-Stat sees USB peripheral shipments increasing 141 percent this year. When an updated version of the USB specification ships next year, adds Whalley, it will have 40 times the current capacity and be able to handle dozens of connections simultaneously.

Also significant are LANs for resource sharing in small and home offices. All Intel's concept PCs have built-in Ethernet adaptors for access to resources distributed over a LAN or the Internet. This coming year, Bluetooth add-ons using USB ports will add wireless connectivity for devices within a 30-foot radius, says Whalley, followed by Bluetooth on motherboards in 2002.

Another challenge: minimizing heat and noise in a PC while downsizing its footprint and upping its processing power. Intel has improved its power management and heat dissipation techniques in its concept PCs; it started by taking the AC power supply entirely out of the PC and making it an external "brick" like those used for portables. Then it added smaller, quieter fans and, says Whalley, "moved around a lot of things to remove heat passively using the chimney effect."

Air flow is helped by replacing ISA add-in card slots with new, low-profile, plug-and-play PCI bus slots. Plug-and-play hasn't always worked as advertised, but your experience is due to improve, says Whalley, as peripheral driver writers focus on this new PCI standard.

He also predicts delivery on another unfulfilled promise--the Instant On PC. Waking up a "sleeping" PC has been enough hassle that many users just leave their PCs running all the time or shut them down completely, he says. Suspend-and-resume will work better in future PC models, says Whalley, because of greater cooperation among chipset-, BIOS- and OS-makers on the ACPI 2.0 specification. Whalley adds that vendors also have worked together to reduce those long cold-boot and shutdown times to less than 30 seconds.

SHOPPING TIPS

The savings on a great price can be quickly lost if your vendor doesn't offer ways to reduce your after-sale maintenance costs, warns Margevicius. Gartner figures the cost of maintaining a Windows desktop at around $10,000 per year--mostly soft dollars paid in labor and lost productivity. Gartner counsels corporate clients to cut time lost to PC support by buying systems from longstanding vendors who promise component compatibility for the life of that model. Vendor software should let you inventory, troubleshoot and update software and drivers remotely over a LAN or the Internet. (The new technology initiatives help.)

Corporate purchasing managers are counseled to buy the most advanced PCs they can afford. But cash-strapped entrepreneurs can find the same innovations in low-end PCs. "The low end has a lot of computing power now," says Margevicius. "Even the cheapest PCs these days are powerful enough for 75 to 80 percent of office productivity workers."