 | Gateway 2000 E3110 266 Enterprise Systems PCReviewed by Liang-Wu Cai |
I didn't intent to write a PC review at the beginning, since I am not familiar with PCs. But using it for a while, I felt that have something to say, :-) not particularly about Gateway 2000.
Specifications
Buying a custom-built PC these days has become quite convenient. Go to a web page, specify a few major specifications you want, then you immediately got the price quote. The internal purchasing procedure within MIT bureaucratic system is much more involved. Having the purpose of image processing in mind, my basic idea for my new PC is: high specs but would nto care a slightest bit about multi-media. Here are what I got:
I wanted WinNT to be my regular OS, per suggestions from friends. I found that, I had to pay extra $99 for a factory-installed WinNT, whereas I could buy WinNT separately for $109. For $10 extra, I would have a dual-boot. So this is the way to go. (This also turned out to be a good decision as the printer turned out to be only usable under Win95.)
The service at Gateway is very courteous and well deserve a praise. They had originally installed a wrong network card for me. I called them up around 4pm, they looked up my order and admitted the error. The next morning (I usually get in around noon), the over-night shipped new network card was already on my desk. After a few days of messing with Win95 and WinNT, I found and I need to change the network card again (a mistake in my part). Call up again around 4pm, and got the thing the next morning.
Windows 95
Win95 came as pre-installed in my new PC. Although I thought that I could careless about the multi-media, I actually had a quite fancy set of speakers (Cambridge SoundWorks PC speakers with amplifier-built-in sub-woofer, $220). Upon dumping the old 486 box, I had the mercy to the sound card to this new PC.Actually, another thing that forced me to move the sound card was Adobe's PhotoShop. I loaded the PhotoShop installation CD onto the CD drive. Upon opening the CD drive icon, the computer hangs up for no obvious reason. Reboot. Well, this time, a bit better: at least I could see the list of folders in the Adobe PhotoShop CD. It took me a while to realize that the hang-up is due to the lack of the sound card! It never crossed my mind that my image-processing program needs a sound card to work! Probably Lee Icocca should have come out and say: In this multi-media hype, you either lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Moving the sound card is not as trivial as I thought (that Win95 is supposed to be Plug&Play OS). Moving the sound card, after chewing the hard disk for a good 10 minutes, Win95 did not recognize it. Changed a slot, reboot: OK, it recognized that I got something new, and installed the driver for me sort of automatically. Playing a sound: oops, you don't have the thang called the sound card! Try this, reboot; try that, reboot; try this and that; reboot.... Finally, I got it to work. It really pissed me off: every slight change of the parameter, the computer wants to be rebooted, and every reboot takes 5 minutes!
Another thing: GW2000 also installed a LanDesk Client Manager for the PC. Guess what, every time I reboot, it tells me that "Disk space is running low! Wanna know more about it?" Yeah, I know I have probably 6Gs of disk space left.
Till now, I have used the Win95 for quite a while, and I still don't like it. It has crashed numerous times, and sometimes does strange things. But the thing I hate the most about Win95 is still its interface, although I have to admit that it is indeed much better than Windows 3.x. But I think it is still far inferior to either MacOS or the X-Window for Unix. MacOS is very user friendly such that its user does not really need to know much about the computer. In Unix, I sit fact to fact with the computer, I issue commands and the computer does things as told: I am in total control. Win95, on the other hand, makes me think that it is not designed for idiots: it plagiarizes MacOS pretty well, but I always feel that there is an idiot between the PC and me.
Windows NT (4.0)
Installing the WinNT is on my own, and the software only comes with a thin booklet about 1/20 to 1/10 the thickness of DOS 4.0 manual, which I happened to have found one in my lab. Again it proved that both Microsoft and I over estimated my own comprehensibility. At the first, I was prompted to chose a partition and the file format for the NT installation. I thought (and later praised by a PC-expert friend) I should choose the NTFS (NT file system) for the NT partition. Installation appeared to be fine, except that I have to reboot the computer a couple more times before the installation can be completed. After it thought that the installation was complete, I was told to reboot the computer again. I did, but got the message that my display was not compatible, and WinNT had decided to used the default CGA mode. (Any one can still remember this mode? 16 colors and 320x200 pixels! Oh yeah, the characters were very large, and I had a 17" monitor!) I tried to change the display setting: change this, reboot; change that, reboot; change, reboot, ch.., reboot, reboot, reboot, ...... I could never get it right. In the process, somehow, I found that I had two bootable copies of WinNT.In a desperation, I sent an e-mail to Gateway2000's tech support. I believe the problem lie in the video card that was custom-manufactured for the Gateway PC thus some hidden glitches. They sent me back a lengthy instruction, which I believed have tried days before but somehow failed. After reinstalling the video driver, this part worked fine.
Next project was the sound card, which had been working under Win95. Unfortunately up to this day, after hundreds of reboots, I am still unable to get it to work. Maybe the problem is just that it requires a 32-bit sound card? I dug out sound card's manufacturer's web page for its latest driver for the winNT, that still no success. (Actually, the exactly card was no longer listed in manufacturer's web page. I downloaded the driver for a similar card.
Afterwards, I proceeded to install softwares. The first thing was PhotoShop, of course. The installation was done under Win95. I was more than happy to find out that one single installation worked under both platforms. However, weird thing happened when I click on its icon: the picture, which looked normal under Win95, was somewhat like a green-toned B&W image although my original was brilliantly colorful. Closer look I found that the selectable video modes were a bit strange: there are 16, 256 colors, 16-bit "high color" or 32-bit "true color". What happened to the conventional 24-bit "true-color"? Is the greenish picture due to the setting at the "32-bit true color"? I changed to 16-bit color mode, bit it was obvious not good enough for photographic purpose. I downloaded several images from PhotoShop’s demo disk, all appeared green in "true color". Afterwards, I booted into Win95, the same "32-bit true color" works normally there. I still don't have this problem resolved. I believe the problem is with the video card. I'd stay with Win95 for image processing. That's where my printer works, anyway.
Monitor
I didn't buy the monitor from Gateway because I could get specifications. First, I have to tell a little story to explain my choice for a monitor.My research work at one point needed to print out a few hundreds pages of computer-generated images. At that time, we had a 486 PC and I thought about a cheap ink-jet color printer. I asked a friend who had just bought such a printer ($350) for a printed sample. On the other hand, as a photographer, since I already had my heart set for a dye-sublimation printer for my personal use, I had done some research and accumulated some samples. When I discuss the purchasing plan (I proposed a $350 printer) with my boss, I showed him all the samples, and he was immediately struck by the quality of the dye-sub printer. I told him the cheapest would be $2K. "No problem!" Later I found out that I needed another computer, which could range from $2-4K, to drive the printer. When my boss nodded his head, I felt guilty. I was proposing a mere $350 printer, ended up with a purchase of $7K! I had a mercy for his budget, thus, I decided to get a mid-range monitor.
I
chose a newly marketed Hitachi SuperScan Elite 630 17" Monitor.
(Actually a remarketed monitor previously called Elite 611.) The main specifications
are very decent, the price was good: $570. One striking specification is its "0.22mm
pitch" size, since even Sony's high-end 17" monitor has 0.28mm pitch. Other
specifications include: max resolution 1600x1200, maximum non-flickering resolution
1280x1024. Max refresh rates are 68 and 80 for the above two resolutions. It
features Hitachi's "black matrix CRT with Invar mask and AR coating" technology.
My PC-expert friend (who generated the ink-jet printer sample for me) claimed that it was an excellent monitor and a good buy after using the monitor for a couple weeks. (My monitor arrived earlier than the PC, so I sent this monitor to him for an evaluation.) Using the monitor for a while, I found I am not quite happy with it. Hitachi's "Invar mask and AR coating" is still no comparison to Sony's Trinitron, which is abundant around MIT campus since most SGI and Mac monitors are Sony's. I have an SGI and the PC sit side-by-side, and the difference is very noticeable: pixels in Trinitron is tightly packed, and images can be examined extremely close without seeing the pixels. In the case the pixels are observable, pixels are all line up vertically which is consistent with the way the screen is addressed in softwares. On the Hitachi's, images looks fine at a normal viewing distance but the screen pattern (gridded 45 degree) becomes very noticeable, and a pixel becomes a fuzzy term. The "0.22mm pitch" is totally misleading.
The Brute Power of PC
Before buying this PC, I was repeatedly told that PCs these days are faster than the UNIX workstations. I had always been skeptical and believed that, although workstation's CPU runs at significantly lower MHz numbers, its RISC architecture was still a better performer for scientific computations. At least, I was very impressed by IBM's workstations (RS3000 etc.). Now that I have this PC, and I don't do image processing all the time, I'd move some computations onto this machine.I spent one day to port my programs onto this machine, using Microsoft Visual C++. Surprisingly the porting was extremely smooth, except a trivial thing that idiots at Microsoft do not know what the value the mathematical "pi" is. Otherwise, all my programs, a couple hundreds of printed pages, compiled successfully without even an warning. Basically the time I spent was to learn how to use Visual C++. I was even more surprised to find out that a computations that normally takes one full day on my Sun Sparc 5 workstation can be done in this PC in mere 3 hours!
That is some computing power! I have so far moved all my computation works onto this PC. But, still, I don't like MS Windows, be it 3.1, 95 or NT. For my research, I still work more comfortably on Sun or SGI machines, I only use PC to do the computation. You bet, on the PC, I can't live without the DOS, a DOS emulator at least. I have my sympathy for Intel: such almighty CPUs to be controlled by such pathetic operating systems. Linux, anyone?