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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (53396)	1/9/2003 2:36:25 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

but do they matter? Of course, the answer is yes and no. My attorney only recently converted from an ancient luggable computer with 8" floppies and an ancient version of Word Perfect, but the only reason she converted was that the box was threatening to die irretrievably and her son gave her one of his used systems. To her, none of this mattered and the new box is only a marginal improvement because what she is trying to do is simple and well served by older technology. To me, the difference between having to break for lunch to get a CAD rendering with the CPU so busy during the process that the box was almost unusable for anything else to having that rendering coming out of the printer in 20-30 seconds is a major change in the way I can work. So, needs and perceptions of the user are extremely important. ... try getting the dashing one interested in the jazzy features of your new cellphone, for example. But, there are also real differences and real applications in which those differences matter. To be sure, it can be very difficult sorting out the various factors contributing to performance. AMD's chip architecture appears to be currently inherently better at a family of computational problems, for example, so that speed for speed the AMD is faster. If that is only 5%, it may be hard to say that it is compelling, however, but some of these differences are much more dramatic. And, of course, people often pay attention to one aspect of their system and not others, clouding the overall difference. E.g., my system also has a GeForce Ti4600 graphics adapter with 128MB and dual 10,000 RPM ultrafast SCSI disks in a striped RAID arrangement to optimize disk throughput. Most people don't push that hard to make sure there are no bottlenecks. And, helping in the confusion is the trend for operating system software, at least that from a certain Washington company, to rapidly continue to increase in size and complexity, along with the application software that runs on it, so that one needs faster and faster machines just to equal the old performance!