Thursday, February 19, 1998

PC talk can be cheap, but pay more for better results

Q. IBM's Via Voice is much cheaper than Dragon Systems Inc.'s Naturally Speaking Continuous Speech product. Is Dragon's product worth it?

--J. Mark Southard @Prodigy.com

A. Unless you're going to use voice recognition in a big way, I'd say go the cheap route. For $99, IBM's product recognizes speech just as well and includes powers to issue voice commands to an Internet browser that Dragon lacks.

But Dragon's $169 product offers a bunch of features that this writer prefers over IBM's Via Voice, and heavy users of speech would probably prefer having them. Keep in mind that I am not a heavy user of speech. In fact, using it drives me nuts.

But for those who do like to talk their text into their machines, they should know for openers that both products need a headset microphone and that the one included with Dragon is a lot nicer than the one from IBM. Dragon also shines with a bunch of voice commands that Via Voice doesn't do as well. For example, you can utter the phrase "What can I say?" with Dragon and a screen pops up showing you all the commands available. Dragon also makes correcting mistakes much easier by including a command "scratch that" that simply deletes the last phrase you spoke if the software goofs.

Q. I like to run heavy applications such as IBM's Via Voice, and my Pentium 166 doesn't quite perform as well as I would like, so I'm going to give it to my daughter in college and upgrade. My question is this, Which is faster and better, Pentiums with MMX or the new Pentium II?

--E. White @aol.com

A. Your confusion is understandable given the hype and complexities surrounding Pentium MMX vs. Pentium II. For openers, virtually all Pentiums now on store shelves include the MMX (multimedia extensions) feature. Pentium IIs have it and so do lesser Pentiums costing hundreds of dollars less than Pentium IIs.

Advertisers harp on the MMX while pushing lesser Pentiums because they have large stocks of non-Pentium IIs in the back room. But Pentiums IIs also have MMX, which is a technique for consigning part of the chip to the highly repetitive operations needed to display pictures and sounds. By funneling the graphics functions to a special part of the chip, MMX both speeds up graphics and lets a microprocessor do its other stuff much faster than before.

Pentium IIs with MMX include other features such as Dual Independent Bus Architecture to let them do many things twice as fast as other Pentiums. But even Intel Corp. admits that you need special software (mostly unwritten to date) to take advantage of this huge new speed feature.

I am using Via Voice on a 266-megahertz Pentium II and it works great. But it also works great on a regular 166-megahertz MMX IBM Thinkpad.

Check out the relative speeds of everything from your bare-bones bare-bones 166 to the Pentium II 300 megahertz at Intel's own Web page, www.intel.com/procs/perf/icomp/index.htm You'll see that the good news is that, whatever you decide, your daughter is going to have a great machine to take off to college.

Q. I gave my folks my old Packard Bell Legend 606 as a starter computer. The motherboard has a receptacle for a single SIMM chip. The original manual for the computer only lists up to a 16-megabyte SIMM upgrade. Would this be because the 32-megabyte SIMM came after the manual was printed, or is there something about the motherboard that would limit the RAM I could install?

--Dave Halun @aol.com

A. Bummer, Mr. H., you are yet another victim of a cyber con game I call Two-SIMM Monte. Packard Bells and many other computers as well require memory expansion to be done only by installing matched pairs of SIMMS (Single Inline Memory Module). So when you see those ads promising 32-megabyte SIMM chips for under $200 you need to keep in mind that you'll need to add two of them rather than just one and thus bring your machine up to 64 megabytes of extra memory. If you want 32 megabytes you would have to buy two 16s.

Sadly, your particular Packard Bell comes with 8 megabytes of RAM built in, so all you can do is add a second 8-megabyte SIMM to bring it to a maximum possible of 16 megabytes.

Q. I think that with just a little thought most people (with a used computer to donate) could come up with a small not-for-profit group to make a contribution to. Start with their interests and work from there: their church, perhaps; a local theater, dance or music company they've been to; a particular civic cause like drug abuse or HIV/AIDS. If they have a cause but don't know a particular group, the Yellow Pages, believe it or not, isn't a bad place to start.

--Peter Rybolt @nexttheatre.org

A. When I asked readers for suggestions about what to do with the waves of perfectly good PCs getting orphaned every day as affluent folk upgrade to the hottest new multimedia playthings, I hoped to find a few clearinghouse organizations that take in donated PCs, give the donors a tax receipt and then hand the hardware to a deserving party. As you will see below, I did find a wealth of groups out there striving to take Macs and PCs shed by the fortunate and pass them along to the less fortunate.

But many readers like you offered the common-sense solution that this sometimes technology-obsessed writer overlooked. Hang up your modem and talk to live people. Ask at the church, the school, the storefront community action outfit. Many, it turns out, are hungry for computers that lack all the multimedia bells and whistles but that will churn out newsletters or bring the light of discovery to the eyes of an inner-city child.

If you want a clearinghouse read on:

Q. You were correct to write that most small businesses need more than high-tech leftovers; however, many not-for-profits would kill to receive some 286 or 386s. And a free 486? Well, that would be like a high-end Pentium to you and me.

I work for a Chicago United Way-based group that helps local not-for-profits with computer technology and am always looking for high-tech leftovers.

For more information about our group, visit our site at www.enteract.com/uwcmvist Would you ask anybody wanting to make a donation of used working computers to e-mail me at uwcmvist@enteract.com or fax: 312-580-2860?

--Joseph Holper @hotmail.com

A. I was delighted to find that the federal AmeriCorps/VISTA (Volunteers In Service to America) program has opened your office here in Chicago with the specific goal of supplying technology to inner-city schools and neighborhood improvement groups. Thanks much for offering to find worthy recipients for this column's readers' excess binary baggage.

Q. There is a need for donated used Macs as well as PCs. Many public schools could use computer castoffs. These machines may be worthless to companies, but they can still be a godsend to kids who otherwise could never afford a computer.

--Alan Hale, Chicago

A. Macs have a special place in the schools of America because of Apple Computer Inc.'s long-standing efforts to reach out to educators. I'm tickled to see your offer to keep Mac in the picture on the donation front as well.

---

(Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoates@tribune.com or snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611. If you think you've got a better answer to any of these questions, add your point of view at www.chicago.tribune.com/go/askjim)