Cheap Computers, Cookies & Internet Banking

In this issue of the newsletter Ford Bond and Brian Lantz write about their experiences building a computer from scratch. In Ford's case he put together his machine from mostly spare parts along with the WinChip and motherboard supplied to members of our group by IDT/Centaur. Brian it appears is using mostly new components. His articles (this is the second of three) are more general in that they provide details of things you might encounter in any PC assembly and not just the particular one he is describing. But if assembling your computer yourself is not your thing, read on.

Those computer prices just keep going down, and the power of the stuff inside them just keeps going up. Last week my sister ordered a Gateway 350 configured as follows for $1698 plus tax and shipping.

Actually, she exchanged the 17" monitor for a 15" one due to space limitations on her desktop, and, per my suggestion, upgraded the Winmodem to a standard modem. I think the final price with tax and shipping was a little over $1,800. And if one is willing to forgo some of the above features like the large hard drive, the large monitor, the DVD instead of a CD, 32 MB RAM instead of 64 MB, you can get the price down closer to $1,200 without tax and shipping. Sales tax is one of the drawbacks with Gateway for Florida residents. Local stores mean sales tax on ordered items. Quite possibly if you buy from Dell or Micron you will not have to pay a sales tax.

As we all know from the ads in the newspaper, computers well below $1,000 are out there--and from name brand companies. So why spend $1,800 when $999 will get you a better computer than you could have bought a couple of years back? I suppose the main reason is that one wants the features of the more expensive computer--but not the much more expensive one priced at close to $3,000. And I recommend Gateway since they have served me so well in the past. I bought a Gateway 386 in 1991 for $2,490 (no tax back then). I think it had a 125 MB hard drive and 4 MB RAM. The hard drive was eventually upgraded to 1.1 GB, and the memory to 16 MB--at prices of $75/MB to $45/MB. Boy how those memory prices have come down. Of course, the 386 had only a 14" monitor and no modem or sound card--both items purchased within a few months.

Then there was a no name 386 that we had which I upgraded to a 486 80 Mhz. I forget the price of all that. The next Gateway was bought in 1996 for $3,347 including tax and shipping. It was a P-166 with 32 MB RAM and a 2.5 GB hard drive, 17" monitor, 28,800 modem, sound card & 12 speed CD, and Microsoft Office Professional. That is the computer I am using to write this on. I have added a second 5 plus MB hard drive, and I do need to get around to adding another 32 MB of RAM. It is interesting to compare my sister's computer above to this one. Two years and five months get you more computer for just over half the price.

There are, however, still some expensive computers out there if you want to buy on the bleeding edge. To thank our son for getting through college in record time, thus saving us many thousands of dollars in tuition and expenses, as a graduation present last June we gave him the best Gateway had to offer at the time. It was a system with a 450 MHz processor, 19" monitor, 128 MB RAM, 14 GB hard drive, etc. coming in just under $4,000. I would never buy such a system for myself. I believe in dropping back at least one step from the bleeding edge machine, which, then, would probably have been around $2,800. You pay a big premium to have the latest technology.

So, I have purchased three Gateways, and advised others to do the same when asked for a recommendation (which most of the time is not followed since they can not stand to wait the 10 - 14 days from placing the order to receiving the machine. They opt for the instant gratification gotten from going to Comp-USA and purchasing a Compaq or HP off the shelf). I have done it because of my belief that Gateway gives good value for the price you pay--if you don't buy on the bleeding edge. Others feel the same about buying a Dell or a Micron.

When it comes to laptops, however, I started with and have remained with IBM. In laptops, I feel that the ability to get parts for or get the machine repaired is more important than the absolute lowest price. And IBM provides that; plus in the current 385 series there is a good cost to value ratio. I bought two ThinkPads (the less expensive versions) for my son while he was in college. And now that he is out earning his own living, he just purchased a new one for himself. Each time he gets a new one, he always passes along the old one to me. The latest one he purchased, a ThinkPad 385XD-LEU, features a 233MHz Intel Pentium Processor with MMX , a 12.1" TFT Active Matrix Display, 32MB EDO memory , 3.2GB² Hard Drive 24X Max CD-ROM, and a 56K PCMCIA Modem with X-Jack Sound Blaster Pro-Stereo. That has more power than my current P-166 desktop, and it cost about $1,000 less than did the P-166 in 1996. Perhaps he will tire of it soon and pass it on to me.

Last month I wrote about the grocery shopping list compiler I had created at http://www.lamartin.com. Recall that if you didn't shop at one of the four stores in South Tampa for which I had a walking order, your list of selections would have to be printed in alphabetical order. I mentioned that I would work on a method of allowing you to order by food category the store at which you usually shopped.

Well, I have now done that. If you now visit the site, at the bottom of the page where you select the items you wish to purchase, you will see an 18 x 18 matrix of radio buttons which allow you to indicate the order in which the 18 food categories appear in your particular store. For example: Produce, Dairy, Meat, Canned, etc. You only have to make the ordering once, since when you set the radio buttons for your ordering, select the order by food category option, then click the submit button, a cookie will be written to your hard drive storing this information. On a subsequent visit, the cookie will be read and the radio buttons will be set the way you selected them the previous visit.

Some people fear cookies, and a lot of fuss is made over them in the media and by certain individuals. It is like they are some sort of invasion of privacy. I don't see it that way at all. They basically store information about the settings you use when you last visited a site, e. g., a user name and password necessary to visit the site, or certain preferences you have about the way the site displays information or what information it displays. This is all to the user's advantage.

Now, of course, if some devious programmer creates a site that asks you for your social security number, your credit card number, etc., and you are foolish enough to enter this information, then cookies don't even need to enter the picture for him to grab this information. I can think of nothing of importance that a cookie can record that you don't explicitly give it by entering information that is requested.

You simply can't depend on banks to not hit you with a fee if they think they can get away with it. I am sure you have noticed all the ads this year touting free Internet banking to access your account information and transfer funds between accounts over the Internet. Now if you want to pay your bills via the Internet, then there would be a fee, but no fee for just looking at transactions. I jumped at the chance to Internet enable an account at Huntington and one at Nations. Well, as of December 1, Huntington says they will no longer provide the service free--even though, in my opinion, it saves them money over other ways I can use to get account information. However, they are still pushing it as a free service at their Internet site.

Should I simply move the Huntington Account to Nations to get the free service. I just might; however, I purchased 1000 computer checks from Quicken for this account. They would be no good at Nations, and I have only used a little over 100 of them. Additionally, once Nations sees that Huntington--and many other banks--are charging for Internet access, they will probably keep their Internet access free just long enough to snare people like me, then impose the fee. u