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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TGPTNDR who wrote (140900)	12/8/2001 8:12:53 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1586543

They had a good name in the hard drive business once,and still do with some, but they've had some quality problems -- or so I've heard. As storage densities have increased WDC has turned out one badly designed drive after another. Starting with the 1GB IDE drives, and a problem ever since, these drives have crashed at an alarming rate. We reached a point where we had to begin specifying NO WDC drives in hardware we ordered for resale (turnkey systems with our software). We replaced WDC drives 3 times in a single machine a couple years ago -- all were replaced under warranty, but the amount of lost time was huge. In all the systems we sold since these events, we have purchased NOT ONE WD drive. I'm sure others had similar experiences.

To: TGPTNDR who wrote (140900)	12/8/2001 8:53:14 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1586543

AAH, Yes, Western Digital. I've been looking over WDC for several years.And every time I look I say no. They had a good name in the hard drive business once,and still do with some, but they've had some quality problems -- or so I've heard. TGPTNDR, successful turnarounds [and I am not putting WDC in that category yet] usually have a bad name right before they turnaround. That's why there are stellar profits to be made when you pick them right. I've been buying Maxtor, IBM and Seagate drives(But not the stock). MXO actually looks to me to be the better/buy in hard drive manufacturers by my parameters(Debt/Equity = .28 && Price/Book = 1.5 ) vs WDC (D/E = 4.12 && P/B == 37 ), though I'll grant that WDC has the momentum at the moment.. Having said that, I'll add that in the storage line I bought small quantities of EMC and NTAP during late September-- not because they looked good to me, just because they were so darned cheap. You know what........go to www.bigcharts.com; in percentage terms, compare the stock growth for EMC, NTAP, MXO and WDC first for the latest 3 mos., then 2 mos., and then for 1 mos. And remember that all 4 stocks have huge floats so its not just the retail investor buying........for the kinds of moves you will see, it requires the 'smart money' to be in there. Whey you say Actually, from a technicians point of view, most downtrend lines have been broken but I understand what you mean. I'll agree with you from a draw a line on a chart point of view. From my point of view we may have over-corrected the 9-11 reaction. It looks like Afghanistan is going OK. Earnings Pre-Announcements haven't started coming in yet. The long bond is dropping in price again(interest rates going up). There's a lot that can go wrong right now. Not saying it will, but I'm not comfortable. Plus Rukeyser took Friday off and you know what happens when he does that! I am not comfortable either.........but the problem with that is by the time we are comfortable, the big gains will have been made. I guess I plan to be uncomfortable for a while. ;~)) ted

To: TGPTNDR who wrote (140900)	12/12/2001 11:20:19 AM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 1586543

Maxtor has an excellent 40 gig drive; 7400 rpm, <9ms, 2 MB buffer, UDMA 133/100. You can pick these up for around $90 which makes it a good fit in a "standard" PC. I just upgraded one of my PCs to an AMD 1600+ using the ECS K7S5A MB. I'm using a Matrox G400 graphics card (nothing special) and running it under Windows XP. This thing rips! The MB has been rock solid and my only complaint is that there are few adjustments to allow performance tweaking. The board uses the new SiS 735 integrated logic chip that has both north and south bridge on the same silicon with the interface, of course, at full speed. Although an inexpensive board (~$55), the performance and quality are up there with more expensive boards. I chose it because it has received good reviews and it can use either SDRAMs or DDRs (but not both at the same time). The cost of the MB and Athlon XP was $172. That also included a Thermaltake Volcano 5 fan which helps keep the uP running at around 37 C. So far I am very impressed with the smoothness of the performance of this combo.