February, 2001      Diablo Blue      Page 9

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Cook County election official under Mayor Richard Daley. Just talk to one of the current Board members and put your name in the hat.
Incentive: Discussing ways to incent members to run for Board positions, we briefly discussed waiving membership fees for Board members. That idea was tabled when it was pointed out that we need the dues of all the Board members just to pay for the pizza.
Video Projector: With Charlie and Ron both absent, this was not discussed. Thank goodness!
Meetings: We discussed ways to make the meetings more exciting, but we soon got bored and began to talk about converting Mac files to PC format.

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floppies, and CD-R and CD-RW media are very inexpensive. I envision that soon there will be no more floppy drives on computers. CD-RW drive specifications confuse people because there are three speed numbers associated with the drive. The numbers on a popular HP CD-RW are 8x4x32. The first number is the speed that the drive can write to CD-R media. The middle number is the speed that the drive can write to CD-RW media. The last number is the read speed. Compare this to the speed of a CD-ROM drive. Consider the center number to be the most important. A 1X drive would require 74 minutes to write a full disk (there are none that slow on the market these days). A 4X would require one fourth that time or 18 ½ minutes. A 10X takes us down to about 7 ½ minutes. The incremental cost for the faster drives is not much; get a fast one when you can. The fastest I have seen is a 16X but I suspect they will get faster. In the near future, we will see double density CD-RW drives. This will give us more storage and I expect to see some by the end of the year.

DVD-ROM

DVD-ROM drives let you play DVD movies on your computer, which you probably will not do very often. It also can store lots of information (up to 5.2 GB). Some companies that were shipping multiple CDs are now offering DVD as an alternative. These tend to be database-type things where the user needs multiple CDs of information online.
If the record companies ever start producing a lot of DVD-Audio standard, you may see DVD-ROM drives become really popular. DVD-Audio provides music that has six channels of 192,000 samples per second using 24-bit samples, compared to audio CD that has two channels of 44,000 samples per seconds using 16-bit samples. DVD-Audio promises to provide very high audio quality The speed numbers on DVD-ROM drives look slow but really are not. A 1X DVD drive reads a CD at a speed equivalent to a 10X CD-ROM drive. With drives running at 16X, they are fast drives.

DVD-RW or DVD-RAM

There are two standards for writing DVD disks. The standards, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM, are not compatible. When the industry decides which standard is best, it will be worth buying. Until then, hold off unless you are mastering DVDs for some reason.

The video graphic card options available on a pre-made computer are fairly limited and will probably fall into the business class. It will be fine for business applications and web browsing. If you are a serious gamer or graphics professional, you will want to replace that card with a different card. Some hard-core gamers will spend as much as $600 for a graphics card. Graphic professionals may spend over $1000. For the rest of us, the standard card will do just fine.

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