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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Strickland who wrote (35122)	8/11/1998 2:21:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 50808

Compaq's 5600s all have a DVD-ROM drive. Doesn't say decoder board, but all DVD-ROM machines, not just an option, is big....................... latimes.com Monday, August 10, 1998 PC FOCUS With State-of-the-Art Compaq 5600, the Future Is Now By LAWRENCE J. MAGID don't often write about specific Windows desktop PCs because, frankly, most of them look pretty much alike to me. They all run the same software and most offer the same features. They vary in speed, memory and hard-disk storage but in most cases, not much else. Once in a while a company comes out with a new system that stands out from the crowd. Compaq's new Presario 5600 line of home PCs is noteworthy because the machines come standard with state-of-the-art features that you won't find in most home or office systems. Whether you actually need or can take advantage of some of these features is another matter. While there is nothing revolutionary about this, or any other "Wintel" PC, the machine is made of mostly state-of-the-art components that exceed the specifications of most other systems and offer features not generally found. Every system in the line comes with a DVD drive, a 56K internal modem, a 10-megabit ethernet card and a motherboard with a 100-MHz system bus and USB ports and a FireWire connector. DVD, which stands for "digital versatile disc," stores between 4.7 and 17 gigabytes of data, depending on how the disc is formatted. Either way, it's enough to store a full-length movie. Eventually, DVDs will replace CD-ROMs for software distribution, games and data, but don't hold your breath. Although you can now find movies on DVD (which you can play on a PC DVD player if you really want to watch a movie on a PC screen), DVD software is extremely hard to find. That's partly because there aren't yet that many PCs with DVD drives. By equipping its PCs with DVD, Compaq could change that equation by providing software vendors with a larger market for DVD products. The 5600's two USB ports aren't unusual (most new PCs have them), and USB is now supported in Windows 98. USB, which stands for "universal serial bus," is a faster way to connect peripherals such as scanners, printers, mouses, keyboards and digital cameras. But USB peripherals are only now starting to hit the market.