On The Runway

Entrepreneur, Dec, 2000 by Mike Hogan

Close-out models haven't always been a bargain, since they were soon outrun by the next generation of evermore-demanding desktop software. But the software release cycles have slowed down, while hardware performance continues to race ahead, says Margevicius. Also, with distributed processing over LANs and the Internet taking hold, not everyone needs all their software and processing power in the PC. Reversing a trend, the useful life of today's average system is now 31/2 to 4 years.

But always demand a three-year manufacturer's warranty with next-business-day on-site repair, counsels Margevicius. Longer warranties are too expensive; and, while still usable, the average PC has no resale value after 2 1/2 years.

So what do you do when an out-of-warranty PC breaks? Fix it? No way, says Margevicius. His painful advice: Get rid of it the cheapest way you can and buy a new one. Tough love, but with all the new models coming out, there's no better time of year to do it.

THE LATEST AND GREATEST

A closer look at Intel's Pentium 4 processor

Some jobs just need all the PC you can find. That's why Intel's next-generation Pentium 4 processor was created.

The successor to Intel's 5-year-old P6 architecture, the first Pentium 4 clocks in at 1.4GHz and has plenty of power for full-motion video, audio and 3-D applications from the Internet. Here's how it gets there:

* A longer pipeline inside the main engine queues up three times as many instructions as the Pentium III.

* The instructions are processed in optimum order, rather than in the sequence they were received.

* A separate engine processes frequently used instructions--specifically, integer-based math--twice as fast as the main processing unit.

* An improved Execution Trace Cache arranges predigested instructions in the best order.

* A 400MHz system bus three times faster than the Pentium III's 133MHz bus can transport 64-byte--not just 32-byte--instructions from main memory.

* Graphics and sound are processed faster using 144 new multimedia instructions.