European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - August 16, 1988, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Tips for buying a computer stories by Jack Warner Cox news service t he consumer who has decided Toby a computer and a few programs to bring it alive has great adventure in store and degree of preparation is in order. You have basically two choices buy locally or buy by mail. You can always mail order More cheaply than you can buy Over the counter simple economics dictates that. But the first time buyer ought to shop around locally first. Learn to interpret newspaper and Magazine ads. More often than not incomplete systems Are offered in order to get a Small Price in Large Type. But there will always be Small Type to Tell you what the Price actually includes it May not include a Monitor for instance without which the system is useless and it probably won t include a hard drive which is almost essential. The Price usually won t include Dos and the system won t run without it. What you Are shopping for essentially is service. Any store will Tell you that it has to charge More for its goods than a mail order House because it will follow up the Sale with service and see to it that you Are Happy. Many will even deliver the computer and set it up. Nonsense. A store has to charge you More for the goods because it has inherently higher overhead than a mail order operation. It does not always follow that the store s salesmen have the foggiest idea of what they Are Selling or that they will do you the least bit of Good after the Sale. As for the setup i have had to make House Calls for several friends whose dealers had delivered their equipment and botched the setup. So you look for salespeople who really do know what they Are doing. You can usually Tell. They Are courteous and they answer your questions fully and clearly without trying to bedazzled and befuddle you with their vast knowledge. Whenever possible they should show you rather than Tell you. Beware the computer Salesman who avoids the computer. If you find a Salesman you Trust then i would suggest you pay the additional Cost of the equipment you will get it Back in peace of mind if nothing else. For one thing you May be pretty sure of what you want to do with the equipment without being very certain of what equipment will allow you to do it. The Good Salesman will put together a system that will fill the needs you describe if he thinks you might want something beyond that he will suggest it but he should always make Clear what you can and cannot do with the system under consideration. I know at least two people who thought they were getting color graphics adapters in their checking out a compact Lap top Model. Not Mono systems so they could play games neither did. One in fact had to run through two More oddball cards before the Salesman finally came up with the proper adapter. If you cannot find a Salesman you Trust do not hesitate to fall Back on mail order if you Are buying is Dos equipment. There Are dozens of places to buy is Dos equipment both ism and clones. Most Are reputable. Macintosh equipment however is not easily found via mail order. A few guidelines Check Back through the specialist magazines and see which outfits have advertised consistently. Determine through Calls or ads their policies. Make sure they have an Iron Clad no questions asked guarantee that you can return the Purchase for a full and immediate refund if you Are unsatisfied. Make sure they have a tech department with a toll free line. Some provide a year s service guarantee with some nationwide service organization. If you Are buying software the parameters change a Little. The major difference is that you Are going to get your software support if you need it from the publisher it is unreasonable to expect any Salesman to understand the nuances of every piece of software in his store. So if you know exactly what you want i would t hesitate to buy it by mail. Always charge any mail order Purchase if something goes wrong you have More recourse. Make certain the mail order company never charges you for Back orders until they Are shipped the Best will Check when you Call them to make sure the product you want is in Stock. If you Aren t sure what you want Call around to see if there is a local store that keeps open demonstration copies of its wares and machines on which you can Check out the programs. If you find what you want there buy it from them to Reward their policy of not Selling pigs in pokes. Look also for publishers who will Send you a demo disk for free or a nominal charge. People in smaller towns often have no Choice but to mail order most of their programs. For them i will say that i have personally had Good experiences buying applications and peripherals from pc connection and Mac connection which Are one and the same thing and which advertise in All the is Dos and macintosh magazines. For games i can recommend without qualification a firm called telex in Atlanta its number is 1-800-456-1162. I be been trading there since it was a Little two Man venture and have received nothing but satisfaction. They now carry a huge selection of games for every machine but macintosh. Ism clone Good value for the Dollar Dell computer corp., a Long established Texas outfit is a goo example of the firms offering direct mail sales of ism clones at sharply reduced prices with solid customer support. I be been running one of their new pc s limited system 200 machines which is an at compatible clone with a few of the More accessible elements of the ps-2 Model 50. Dell has just announced a new line of computers which it says will include the chips and technologies version of Micro Channel architecture Mca under License from ism. But software to make use of Mca is a Long Way off and Dell estimates the machines will Cost 30 percent More than its comparable machines without Mca. So for those of us who cannot afford seats in the Vanguard of technology the system 200 is More practical. The pc s limited system 200 is based As Are ism s models 50 and 60 on the at s 80286 Chip. It nods toward the ps2 machines by accepting up to 16 megabytes of ram on the Motherboard and offering via color. It will run operating system 2 if you feed it enough memory which at the current Price of chips would be fearfully expensive. But basically it is a seeded up at clone running at 12.5 Mhz. Our review system was the via color plus Model and included a 1.4mb 3.5-Inch floppy drive As Well As a 1.2mb 5.25-Inch floppy a 40-mb High Speed hard drive and an extra 512k of ram on top of the Standard 640k. This is not the fastest thing on the Market by any Means. But when combined with the 28 is hard drive it presents a machine that makes an 8 Mhz the old Standard at Speed _ with a 40 is drive seem woefully sluggish. In fact i believe i d rather have the 28 is. This system before the extra memory and the 3.5 drive were added runs $2,600. That is about $2,000 less than the list Price of an ism Model 50 with via color display and a very slow hard drive. A couple of very important Perks come in the Price. There is solid toll free tech support of which i have made considerable use and a one year service policy with Honeywell Bull and they la come to you if you re within 100 Miles of one of their service centers. There is also the essential guarantee of full refund within 30 Days of Purchase if you Are unsatisfied with the equipment. The system 200 is definitely not your Small footprint Type the Large Metal Case encloses a carefully and sturdily constructed set of innards. Everything fits properly screw holes line up and that sort of thing which is not always the Case with cheaper machines. The system 200 we got includes the not getting in on the ground floor of the computer age at a California elementary school. Phoenix technologies bios generally considered to be As close to 100 percent ism compatible As any on the Market and the video seven via display card a High Quality graphics adapter. We had a lot of trouble with the disk drives they did All manner of strange things. Honeywell replaced the drive controller card which cleared up most of the problems and then installed new cabling which corrected the rest of them. Other than that the machine has been Rock solid. I have just three objections i do not much care for tie key tropics keyboard. It is a pity that clone makers having succeeded in rendering their machines almost entirely compatible with ism Don t try to copy big Blue s keyboard touch. The keyboard of the system 200 is not so bad that you can t get used to it it just does t have that positive Long throw touch of the ism boards. The Mitsubishi 1429c Monitor is unimpressive. By comparison with my Mitsubishi 1430c Ega Monitor the colors Are a Little faded and there is a distinct problem in distinguishing Between red Brown and yellow at the higher resolutions. It is also a very slow starter taking nearly a minute to reach full brightness. This is the noisiest computer i have Ever heard. The fan which is unfortunately built into the 200-Watt Power Supply and thus cannot simply be replaced Cranks up like a jetliner. In our House the computer Midden is upstairs and this is the first machine we be Ever had whose on off state could be determined from the foot of the stairs. It is very annoying for about a week then like the keyboard you get used to it. But you should t have to go through that. I doubt a quiet fan would Cost Dell significantly More than this Turbine. Despite these caveats i think the pc s limited system 200 is a very Good machine at a competitive Price with enough after Sale support to allay the fears of first time purchasers. Dell has a lot of other systems including much cheaper monochrome ones. Dell is located at 9505 arboretum Boulevard Austin Texas 78759. Software emulators tear Down barriers Between computers Bojoh Markoff new York times the barriers that separate different brands of desktop computers like the macintosh and ism pc Are being torn downy a new Type of software that permits one computer to emulate the functions of another. These software emulators Are called soft co processors or synthetic  they permit applications originally written for one kind of computer to run on an entirely different machine. For example using a software emulator it is possible to run the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet or the word Star word processing program originally written for the ism pc and compatible computers on an Apple macintosh ii or a Sun Micro systems work station. In some cases this software emulation permits programs to run faster than they do on the original ism pc. Industry analysts said the soft co processor technology was essential in helping computer manufacturers to Bridge the growing Gap Between the time a new computer appears and the time new software becomes available that can take full advantage of the computer s capabilities. One of the big problems in switching to a newer computer is that in the past it has meant throwing away All your software said Michael Slater publisher of microprocessor report a Palo Alto calif., Industry newsletter. The Long term consequence of emulation is that it May make computers much More generic where anybody s computer could run anybody s software. If you have enough horsepower that becomes  As dramatically faster computer hardware has been introduced in recent years software that takes advantage of new features has increasingly lagged. For example although the International business machines corp. Introduced its More powerful ism pc at computer in 1983, the os-2 operating system software that could take full advantage of the computer s features was not offered until this year. As even More powerful computers Are introduced the software emulators Are expected to make it possible for the machines to use existing software and data. This would permit use of the new computers immediately and avoid the wait for new software to reach the Market. We re replacing hardware components with software modules that function exactly like the original hardware said Neal Colvin chairman of Phoenix technologies ltd., a Norwood mass., software development company. The Sun and Apple computers Are both based on a powerful 32-bit microprocessor Chip made by the Motorola corp., while the ism pc is based on a much less powerful 8-bit microprocessor made by the Intel corp. The two chips Are so different that they even read data in opposite directions. Software emulation Means that older but valued software that runs on the 8-bit ism pc machines can be effortlessly used on the newer Sun or Apple machines. So far emulation technology permits Only ism pc programs to run on macintosh computers and Sun work stations. Although it is technically feasible no software to permit macintosh programs to run on ism computers is available. Apple has erected significant Legal barriers to those wishing to clone its computers and has indicated it would probably sue anyone trying to Market macintosh emulation software. Software emulation technology  new. Ism developed programs in the 1960s so that customers could run their existing software on its new 360 Model mainframe computer. The widespread availability of software emulation will also alter buying decisions for desktop computers according to Industry analysts. They see the technology As blurring the distinction among different brands of computers that until now have been based on the computers internal design. What a piece of software is capable of accomplishing will become More important than what computer it runs on. The emulation programs will make the Choice of a computer less important. As a result the analysts expect that in the future computer hardware will be purchased More on the basis of Price than internal hardware. In addition to Phoenix three companies Are offering software emulators that permit moving is Dos the ism pc mainstay software to newer More powerful computers. Insignia solutions a company with offices in Britain and in san Jose calif., is marketing a program that permits is Dos to run on a macintosh ii or a Sun Micro systems alongside their Normal software. Avante Garde systems of Jacksonville fla., offers a similar program that permits the atari St computer to run is Dos programs. Designers of the emulators achieve the end result using different programming approaches. Phoenix and insignia Are using a technique called incremental compilation to translate is Dos software instructions for the Apple or Sun directly As a program runs. Hunter systems a Mountain View calif., software Developer first translates an entire is Dos program to make it compatible with an Apple or Sun machine and then runs the program. To accomplish this the Hunter system reads computer instructions designed for the Intel 8088 microprocessor used in the ism pc and then converts them into a new set of instructions that can be read by the Motorola 68020 microprocessor used by the macintosh ii and the Sun work station. According to Colin Hunter Hunter systems president it is possible to take a program like base Iii a data base package designed for ism and ism compatible computers and with a single pass of his company s program automatically generate a version that will run directly on a Sun or macintosh machine. Software co processors Are appearing now because of the Large increase in processing Speed made possible by new 32-bit microprocessors. Only As desktop computers have become dramatically faster have they been Able to imitate the original 8-bit desktop machines. Page 14 the stars and stripes tuesday August 16,1988 the stars and stripes Page 15