Hardware

Beware the leaky capacitors

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,
Beware the leaky capacitors

In case you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, there are some 2001-2003-era motherboards having problems with leaky capacitors.

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Quieting a noisy PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Just as PCs seem to (or sometimes really do) get slower as they age, PCs also tend to get louder as they age. Considering many of them are plenty loud when new, that’s not good.
When a PC is loud, it’s due to one of two types of components: hard drives or fans. The key is to isolate the noise. To do that, your best bet is to open the case, then power the computer on. Running your PC long-term with the cover off isn’t exactly good for your computer, but running it that way for a few minutes won’t hurt anything.

But before you turn the PC on, blow the dust out of it with a can of compressed air. Resist the temptation to just use a small vacuum cleaner attachment; those are static magnets. In some rare instances, just blowing the accumulated dust out will quiet the PC. In nearly all instances, it will make the PC run cooler, and it’ll make you feel better to not have all that crud accumulated inside your expensive equipment.

Loud buzzes are usually caused by failing fans; clunky noises are usually caused by a loud (and often not long for this world) hard drive.

Oiling a fan will usually quiet it and dramatically increase its life expectancy. As long as the fan hasn’t completely died, this is a good bet. It’s certainly cheaper than replacing a fan, and sometimes it’s easier. Don’t ever try to replace the fan in a power supply–oil it, very carefully, and if the noise doesn’t go away, replace the power supply. There are voltages inside power supplies that will throw you across the room, if they’re in a good mood. If they’re in a bad mood, they can potentially kill you, and I really don’t want that.

You can test a fan by stopping it with a pencil or a similarly shaped object. If the noise goes away, you’ve found your culprit.

There’s not much you can do if the hard drive is loud. I’ve heard of people taking hard drives apart and oiling them in efforts to quiet them. Don’t do that. You might well quiet the drive. You also will certainly prevent it from ever working again.

Instead, replace the drive. Modern drives run pretty quietly. Most retail-boxed drives come with free software to copy your old hard drive to the new one, making the upgrade painless. If you’ve never done this before, buy a drive at retail–an OEM drive from a clone shop or mail order outlet may be a little bit cheaper but won’t have any instructions or software–and set aside a Saturday afternoon. Even if you’ve never undertaken anything like this before, it generally doesn’t take more than a couple of hours. As of this writing, a 20 GB Maxtor drive costs $69.99 at CompUSA. The OEM version of the same drive costs $68 at Newegg.com. As you get into bigger drives, the price gap tends to increase, but for many people, 20 gigs is plenty.

Once you’ve oiled or replaced the fans and/or replaced the hard drive with a newer, faster, and quieter model, your formerly loud PC ought to run pretty quietly.

This unusual case wants to house your next PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

The Lope I-Tee computer case is, well, shaped like a T.
When David Huff e-mailed me about it, he called it interesting. I’ll certainly agree with that.

Here’s the idea: You mount the motherboard up against the back plane of the case and put the drives and the power supply up front, yielding a case that’s not as deep as a conventional case and cools better. Allegedly.

I hesitate to write about it because I haven’t worked with one, I haven’t tested one, and I haven’t even seen one. Hmm. I really don’t know anything about it but of course I have an opinion about it. I feel so Slashdotty.

One big advantage of a layout like this is that all the ports are on the side where you can see them and get to them easily. The biggest disadvantage of a layout like this is that all the ports are on the side where you can see them, and depending on the way your desk is set up, they might be on the wrong side.

USB peripherals and front-mount USB ports are the usual cure for fumbling around the back–you can plug your digital camera or other things that move around a lot up there–but plugging your other peripherals in the back hides the cables and prevents things from getting too unsightly. Let’s face it, plugs and cables don’t fit traditional, conventional ideas of a thing of beauty.

On the plus side, cases that disassemble easily are always nice, as are cases that take up less space. But a couple of minutes with my ruler and my ATX cases shows this case isn’t any less deep than most of my mainstream cases, and due to its shape, it is considerably wider. I’d love something that genuinely took up less space on or under my desk, but this case won’t be it.

This case won’t flop on the marketplace though. They claim it improves cooling. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter. People buy aluminum cases because they supposedly conduct heat better. The reality is the difference in heat conductivity between expensive aluminum cases and cheap steel cases is nearly zero, and what difference you can measure is more likely due to aiflow than its material. Enthusiast overclockers still buy them anyway, hoping to get an extra 5 MHz out of their overclock. The same kind of people who buy aluminum cases for overclocking will go for the I-Tee, especially if the I-Tee’s cost is close to that of a mainstream case.

I can’t make any recommendations for or against it, based on not seeing it. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say this–or a design like it–will survive at least as a niche product.

Umm… Don’t water-cool your power supply

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

I saw a thing on Slashdot this morning about water-cooling your power supply. One word: Don’t.
I’ve worked inside a power supply twice–both times to replace a dead fan. One time I touched a heatsink that picked up a charge from somewhere–either a voltage regulator or a capacitor. Anyway, it really didn’t feel good. Beyond that, it made me jump.

Not a project you want to undertake if you don’t know what you’re doing. And if you do know what you’re doing, you probably already know it isn’t something you want to do be doing. Anyone who uses the word “electric” to describe something pleasant has obviously never experienced anything electric flowing through them.

I’ll pass, thanks.

Power supply secrets

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

A good question came up here yesterday: How do you know when your power supply is causing problems? There may be many power supply secrets, but that’s the one most important to know.

There are lots of symptoms of an under-rated power supply: frequent BSODs, spontaneous reboots for no reason, and the screen going black and the system crashing. A failing power supply can also cause other components in the system to fail much more frequently than they should. But generally you’ll see those other symptoms earlier.

Have you ever heard those horror stories about a lemon PC that’s had virtually every component inside it replaced at least once and it still doesn’t work right? Usually you can head off those kinds of problems. The trick is to replace the power supply after seeing two components fail.

In the previous story here, reader Glaurung asked if his IBM Aptiva’s 100-watt power supply might be causing him problems. He observed that two CD-ROM drives died in the system. I think it is.

IBM had a bad habit of skimping too much on the power supplies in its Aptiva and PS/1 lines. The business-class IBM PC line, in my experience, is good quality.

I don’t want to claim to know more about building a PC than IBM. But in that case I’d be replacing that power supply with something bigger. First check to make sure factory power supply doesn’t have any funky auxiliary connectors on it. A small few, especially those that mount their expansion slots on riser boards, do. Assuming yours doesn’t, a 400W unit from a reputable maker like Antec or Sparkle should only run $35 and prevent future peripheral death.

Usually, a low-power power supply becomes a problem when you start expanding. If you start with a system from a reputable maker (particularly a business-class system), the power supply ought to have enough juice to power everything they put in the box. You’re more likely to run into problems once you add a second hard drive and a CD burner. Some clone shops skimp on the power supply to save costs. The consumer machines you see in retail stores (like Compaq Presarios) typically have skimpier power supplies than business desktops (like Compaq Deskpros).

Whitebox systems built by your friendly neighborhood local clone shop vary. A lot of clone shops pride themselves on quality and build better computers than any of the big name brands. Other clone shops pride themselves on being cheap and cut every corner imaginable. The power supply is usually first.

While there are some really nasty motherboards out they aren’t as bad as they were in the past. Most causes of poor reliability in recent systems are due to cheap, commodity power supplies or cheap, commodity memory. PC Chips is notorious for making bottom-feeder motherboards. But given the choice between a computer with a PC Chips board and a quality power supply and quality memory or a computer with an Asus board with a no-name power supply and memory, I’d take my chances with the PC Chips.

Cheap PC upgrade options

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Cheap PC upgrades
Quick: What do you do when a friend or relative has a five-year-old PC that’s just barely inadequate and you want to bring them up to something fairly current without spending much money?

Options vary, depending on the PC. And I get this question really often, but the best option tends to change pretty frequently.

Many five-year-old brand-name PCs use an ATX or MicroATX form factor. You can identify ATX and MicroATX by looking at the back; if the keyboard, mouse, serial and parallel ports are all on the same backplane next to the expansion slots, it’s ATX.

If those ports are all mounted on metal slot covers, it’s probably AT.

AT boards are a tough find these days; I’ve seen Asus boards at www.softwareandstuff.com that max out at a 700 MHz VIA C3 processor in the $60-$70 range. That’s enough speed for word processing and e-mail and Web browsing (read: what 90% of people are interested in) and the price is pretty good. If you’re trying to escape a 64 MB memory limit and/or a 233 MHz processor ceiling, one of these boards plus a 128-meg DIMM can be a very nice upgrade for $100. One of these boards plus a 7200-rpm hard drive will be enough of an upgrade to make the person’s head spin, and remember, if a system is that old, its hard drive is probably near the end of its life anyway. That’ll increase the cost of the upgrade to closer to $170.

If the system is ATX already, or if you’re willing to buy a new case, your options increase dramatically. It’s easy to find an AMD-based board from the likes of Chaintech, Shuttle, and MSI at Newegg.com for $50-$60. AMD Duron processors start at around $30; Athlon XPs start at around $60. You can also find some closeout ATX mobo/CPU combos at places like softwareandstuff.com and compgeeks.com.

Be careful if you buy too much motherboard and CPU; you may have to get an AMD-approved power supply.

The upside to buying a new case and motherboard is current flexibility and future upgradability. You should still be able to buy something to fit in an ATX case for years to come–remember, the basic AT form factor was the standard for IBM-compatible PCs from 1981 to 1997 or so (though in the early years it wasn’t called that) and the ATX form factor, unlike its predecessor, was designed with longevity in mind.

Another inexpensive option can be to buy a newer, but still used, system. It’s fairly easy to find Pentium II and low-end Pentium III-class machines for $100-$150 or so from places like compgeeks.com and pcsurplusonline.com and usually you’re getting former office machines that were pretty well maintained and replaced during an upgrade cycle. If a system is so old as to have few, if any components beyond a keyboard and mouse worth salvaging and you’re not terribly comfortable ripping out and replacing parts anyway, that can be a good option on a shoestring. The ideal system in this situation would be a recognizable name brand and true ATX form factor (Dell uses a weird pinout on its power supplies), but at this price point, you can’t be picky if you want something now because the selection’s always thin and quantities limited. There’ll always be more next week, but next week’s selection will always differ from this week’s.

And of course there’s always the Wal-Mart $199 special. You can pick up a legal copy of Windows cheaply at www.softwareandstuff.com if you don’t want to mess with Lindows or Lycoris Linux. For your money you get a very basic 700 MHz computer built by Microtel. A big-brand used machine will usually have slightly better-quality components, but for some people the extra speed and longer warranty will be worth it.

The downside with buying a complete budget system, new or used, is that the hard drive is often a low-end model. On low-end systems, the hard drive is usually either the biggest or second biggest bottleneck, so a motherboard swap combined with a hard drive upgrade can be the best performance option, even if it ends up being more expensive than replacing the big box outright.

Picking a power supply for my video editing PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I rebuilt my video editing system this past week.
Some months ago, Windows 2000 decided to start acting really goofy–it would start up, and Explorer would crash and restart every 10 seconds. I was able to make the system usable again by going into win.ini and changing the shell from Explorer to the old Program Manager, but seeing as I can’t stand Program Manager, I didn’t like that solution much.

I took the opportunity to make some more changes to the system too, specifically, upgrading to a 1.2 GHz Duron CPU and adding a second 18 GB 10K RPM drive (both purchased for an aborted project) and replacing the Adaptec 2940UW host adapter with an Adaptec 19160 I purchased over a year ago and for some insane reason didn’t use when I built the system in the first place. I also dropped in a Sapphire Radeon 7500 card, since I loaned out the S3 Savage4 card that was originally in the system.

The Radeon is overkill for this application, but it’s a $40 card so I really don’t care. Having a faster processor and a drive dedicated exclusively to holding my source video improved performance noticeably. By today’s standards, this is a very modest system, but it’s very nice for editing. It’s on the low end as far as disk space is concerned–figure a gig per four minutes of video in the standard DV format you’ll get from a firewire-equipped camcorder–but it’s very fast.

It’s also extremely unreliable. In a 90-minute session, the machine locked up twice. One was a black screen of death, and the other was a spontaneous reboot. In its previous incarnation, the system had a 750 MHz Duron processor and a 4500-rpm Quantum lct as a secondary drive for overflow use (I’d use it as a holding bin for video, then move it to the 10K drive for final output to tape to avoid dropped frames). Until the weird Explorer problem, it was rock solid. My Antec 300W power supply handled that load just fine.

That Antec power supply is about three years old, a relic from an era when 500 MHz was a blindingly fast processor and power requirements weren’t as obscene as they are now. Its age and the standards to which it were built are probably a problem.

PC Power and Cooling’s power supply selector gives a nice way to size a power supply to match a system. For me, it suggested that a PCP&C 275-watt power supply would be adequate under some circumstances. Well, assuming the box provided 275 watts divided properly on the correct rails, that is. (That kind of talk makes most people’s eyes start to glaze over, so people don’t talk about it much. PCP&C included.) But this machine has exactly one PCI slot still open, so it’s heavily loaded. I want more headroom than that. No, not that kind of Headroom.

PCP&C has its 350W box on sale for $71, which is considerably higher than Newegg will charge for basic 350W Antec or Enermax units, but pricing on business-grade or enthusiast-grade Antec and Enermax units is in line with PCP&C, and the PCP&C units have a better warranty. Plus PCP&C will ship it free and they throw in some freebies worth about $5 retail when all’s said and done.

I’ll get the Turbo-Cool 350 model rather than the Silencer 275 model. Quiet would be nice, but the system already makes a racket. So I’ll take overbuilt. Everything else about this system is.

End of the road for CD burners?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I know it wasn’t more than a couple of months ago that I read the Taiwanese manufacturers of CD burners and media were leery about going above 48X. And now Asus has released a 52X burner. There’s a very favorable review here.
So now the fastest write speeds have reached parity with the fastest read speeds, which means burning a 650-meg disc (with this drive, at least) takes two and a half minutes. Rewrite speeds are at 24X, which doesn’t sound as impressive, but is very nice.

Not everyone needs this drive. I burn CDs rarely enough that I’m perfectly happy with my 20X unit (in fact, I’ve still got a quarter-spindle of CDs that will only burn at 12X). Personally, I’m more interested in rewrite speeds than in write speeds these days, since most of the stuff I burn is stuff like Linux CDs with a shelf life measured in months. In two years I won’t give a rip about Debian 2.2 or 3.0, so it’s nice to be able to erase and reuse old discs rather than keeping them around, taking up space.

But people’s needs vary. I’m sure some people are very excited about this drive.

Since I keep drives until they either die or are too slow for me use them and keep my sanity anymore (I have a Sony 2X unit and a Yamaha 20x10x40x unit, both in working order, which should tell you something), I’m definitely going to wait for a 52x52x52x unit. Maybe the industry will surprise us with a 56X write speed, but they’re not going to get much higher. At these speeds, the CDs are spinning at 27,500 RPM–nearly twice the speed of the very fastest hard drives on the market. I’ve read about the theoretical possibility of discs shattering at 50x+ speeds, though I’ve never actually seen that. I have seen discs crack though, which is irritating–even more so if you don’t have a backup copy.

I think this market is about to stabilize.

Laptop or desktop?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

All this talk today about cheap notebooks like the Sotec 3120x begs another question: Who should buy one?
Nearly six years ago, I published a column in the Columbia Missourian newspaper. My working title was 101 Reasons NOT to Buy a Laptop but a cooler-headed editor toned it down. I pointed out that you can buy twice the computer for the same amount of money, and laptops are hard to upgrade and they break a lot and you shouldn’t buy one without an extended warranty. (I was shocked to read that I’d said that way back then.)

All of that’s still true today. Except for the twice as much computer for the same amount of money bit. Thank goodness that’s changed.

Now you can buy twice as much computer for half the money.

Back then my job was to set up and fix laptops. I didn’t actually use one very much. I’ve been using one nearly every day for the past year and I’ve found some things to like about laptops now.

Portability. Duh. But this means not only can you take it with you, but you can stash it easily when company’s coming over.

Small size. A desktop computer’s going to take up most of the desk. My current computer desk has more usable space on it than my kitchen counter, which is nice because that gives me some room to work. Or put more computers on it. Guess which I do? But anyway, I can set up a laptop on a small desk and still have space to work.

Quiet. A lot of desktop PCs have three, even four fans in them. They make a lot of noise. Laptops have one fan and it doesn’t always even go all the time. Go back to a desktop and you’ll discover you’ve forgotten how much you like quiet. (Apologies to Charlie for stealing one of his lines.)

Gorgeous display. Another coworker came in today to work on my laptop (more on that in a bit) and to complain about another coworker. He was griping about how his laptop display looked when he hooked it up to an external monitor. I asked why anyone would hook up a laptop to a CRT. I guess it makes you look important.

Flat-panel LCD displays are gorgeous. No flicker, great color saturation, perfect focus, really easy on the eyes. They don’t update fast enough to be good for 120-fps 3D gaming, but for everything else, they’re fabulous. Staring at a CRT for 8 hours wears me out. Staring at an LCD for 8 hours has no effect on me. I’ve got a nice 19-inch CRT–an NEC, and it’s one of the professional line, not the consumer line–and it’s great. But I’ll take my laptop’s 13″ LCD.

You can get a similar effect by connecting an LCD to a desktop, but you’ll get digital converted to analog and back on an inexpensive one, which will affect display quality ever so slightly. A laptop is all digital, from video chip to screen.

The downside. After living with one, I’ve changed my tune a little. It used to be when someone said they were getting a laptop, I’d cringe the same way I would if they told me they were getting a sex change. I don’t do that anymore.

But there are still issues. I’ve broken my laptop twice in the past four months. And I treat mine well. The first was a hard drive. The second was the power connector–a piece of plastic snapped off. You’re looking at a motherboard swap to fix that one, in this age of people not knowing how to solder.

Laptop keyboards and mice take getting used to. Every time my girlfriend comes over and needs to use a computer, she sits down at the laptop and asks me for a “real mouse.”

And I miss my IBM clackety keyboards when I’m using a laptop. (I suspect Charlie would get really annoyed if I used one of those at work though, since he’s in the cube next to me, and the way I type, those keyboards can overpower fan noise. Or phone conversations. Or earthquakes.)

Upgrades remain a problem. I’ve got an IBM Thinkpad 600. Great display, great keyboard, and it’s small and light. But it’s slow. The memory tops out at some weird amount–I don’t think I can put 256 megs in it. CPU upgrades are all but out of the question. I can put a faster hard drive in it, but desktops give a lot more options. Even in my old original IBM AT case I can shoehorn a newer motherboard with an 800 MHz VIA C3 processor, and I can put in a 15K SCSI hard drive if I really want to. And that’s a 17-year-old case. I’ve got better upgrade options with a 17-year-old IBM PC/AT than I do with a four-year-old IBM Thinkpad!

So should anyone buy this new generation of cheap laptops? Well, remember, “cheap” is relative. Even when you can finagle into buying one for $800 through creative use of coupons, that’s still a pretty serious chunk of change.

And because they break as much as ever, I have trouble recommending a laptop as an only computer. If you’ve already got a desktop and plan to keep it and can afford a cheap snazzy laptop, then by all means go for it. You’ll love the freedom to move around. If you can’t afford $800 plus the extended warranty, wait a month or six. They’ll come down. I believe you’ll be able to buy a budget laptop for $599 by this time next year. Possibly even $499.

But if you’re buying your first computer, I think you’re better off with a low-end desktop and a nice flat-panel LCD display. The LCD will outlive the desktop PC, and the desktop PC will give you a lot more upgrade options. And as someone who’s been playing with these things for 20 years, trust me: You’ll want upgrade options.

Straight talk on cheap laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been getting lots of traffic ever since we started talking about the Sotec 3120x laptop here last week. It looks like an era of inexpensive laptops is about to arrive, because the Sotec isn’t your only choice.
Sam’s Club sells a variant of the 3120x for about the same price as Wal-Mart, but it comes with a 30GB drive in place of the 20.

Steve DeLassus tells me a number of places have been hawking Toshiba Satellite 1115-S103 laptops in the sub-$1000 price range after coupons and rebates and other marketing gyrations. Suggested retail price on it is $1099. Street price should be $1049 or lower, as that’s Toshiba’s price if you buy direct. Toshiba’s offering a $200 mail-in rebate. So at the very worst, you can get a Satellite 1115-S103 for $849 if you buy it direct from Toshiba.

And then I did some checking on a hunch. Dell’s offering its Inspiron 2650C for $899 ($849 through 12/11). HP is offering its Compaq Presario 905us notebook with an Athlon XP 1400, 256 MB RAM, DVD, 14.1″ LCD for $999 with a $100 rebate. The HP Pavilion ze4101 has a faster processor but less memory, for the same price. There are some variants on the HPs and Compaqs out there–you might not find in stores exactly what HP’s selling direct, but you’ll find something awfully close.

The Toshiba and Dell offer a bigger screen (14.1 inches), DVD drives, 256 MB RAM (the Dell has 128), and the other expected gizmos like modem and networking, along with a seemingly faster 1.5 GHz Celeron processor.

Which brings up a point.

The 1.5 GHz Celeron is based on the P4 architecture. Remember, at 1.5 GHz, the P4 is a dog. The Celeron is a castrated P4. The P4-based Celeron doesn’t start to give decent speeds until it hits 2 GHz. Even though the Celeron 1.5 has a 300 MHz advantage over the older P3-based Celeron 1.2, the “slower” Celeron will actually be faster. And less expensive.

The HP/Compaq models offer truly faster AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon mobility video chipsets.

I know people are going to ask me which one to buy. So let’s agonize together.

Durability: Toshiba, Dell, HP and Compaq all had decent service records in the past and there are lots of places that will work on them. Sotec is more of an unknown in the United States at this point.

Dell has traditionally had the best reputation, but their laptops didn’t fare well this year in PC World’s service and reliability roundup. HP and Toshiba were the best of this bunch. Now that HP and Compaq are the same company, the Compaq should fare well too.

Frankly, I’d buy an extended warranty with any of them, and count on it breaking at least once. That’s par for the course with a laptop, especially if you use it for what it’s intended, which is carrying it around a lot.

Performance: The 1.5 GHz Celeron in the Toshiba and Dell models is a notoriously bad performer. The 1.2 GHz Celeron in the Sotec is a good performer but the integrated video will hurt. The HPQ models use AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon Mobility video chipsets. Performance on the latest 3D games will disappoint (but LCD screens in general are bad for 3D gaming). But for light gaming and everything else someone might want to do, the HP and Compaq models will be great.

Input: The Sotec offers a slightly reduced keyboard with an at-times quirky layout. The others offer full-sized keyboards. All use touchpads; they’ll be decent but you’ll probably want to pick up a USB mouse with any of them to use at least part of the time. Touch-typists will prefer anyone but Sotec. Hunt-and-peck types probably won’t care much one way or the other.

Portability: The Sotec weighs 4.4 pounds. The others weigh in at 6.5 or 6.9 pounds. None are hogs, but some people will really like the svelte Sotec. The Sotec has a longer battery life. Advantage: Sotec.

Expandability/extras: The Toshiba, HP and Compaq models offer TV-out, which isn’t something everybody needs, but when you want it, you want it. It allows you to use a big-screen TV for presentations in a pinch. You can connect up a TV to the laptop and do digital slideshows for a bigger audience than can crowd around a laptop screen, which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing. And when hooked up to a TV, it can serve as an emergency DVD player.

The Toshiba offers two PCMCIA slots. Everyone else offers one. HP and Compaq memory maxes out at 1024 MB, while memory on the Toshiba and Dell max out at 512 MB to the Sotec’s 384 MB. HP, Compaq, and Sotec are all using shared video memory, so they’ll steal a little system memory to give to the video chip. Toshiba and Dell aren’t doing this. All have built-in USB 1.1 and networking; none offer built-in Firewire.

HP offers the fastest CPU of the bunch, and CPU upgrades in laptops are always questionable.

Advantage: HP.

Serviceability: The Sotec’s DVD/CD-RW drive and hard drive are bolted in, rather than being plug-in modules. It’ll be a lot harder to fix yourself if need be. On most other companys’ models (I don’t know about any of these for certain), the drives slide out easily for replacement. Replacement CD/DVD drives are a pain to track down after the fact for any laptop more than a year or two old, but the big name brands will almost certainly be easier. If you buy an extended warranty, fixing it is someone else’s problem, at least for a couple of years. Advantage: Everyone but Sotec.

Overall winner: Hard to say. The Sotec is designed to be a subnotebook; the others are entry-level full notebooks. If portability and versatility are important to you, get the Sotec. It’s the only one of the bunch that’ll burn CDs for you at this price point. Keep in mind that the Sotec’s combo DVD/CD-RW drive will wear out quickly if you use it to watch a lot of movies, and that replacing it won’t be terribly easy, as it’s not a slide-in module like costlier notebooks use. If you intend to watch a lot of movies on the Sotec, make sure you buy an extended warranty on it.

The Sotec has a couple of question marks, but it also has an awful lot going for it.

The HP and Compaq models have the best combination of serviceability, expandability, speed, and reliability. I don’t think I’d mess with the Toshiba or Dell unless their prices dropped considerably. Between Compaq and HP, HP gives you the faster CPU, while Compaq gives you the bigger hard drive and more memory. It’s easier to add memory and replace the hard drive than it is to upgrade a laptop CPU; I’d get the HP and add memory to it pretty quickly and plan on replacing its hard drive with a large 5400 RPM model in a couple of years. With its best-of-class CPU and video and upgraded someday with a faster hard drive, the HP ought to be a good performer for many years. If the Sotec’s question marks scare you, the HP offers a compelling alternative.

Future outlook: When a system reaches a magical price point (notables were the $899 all-in-one Compaq Presarios in 1996, the $399 eMachine in 1998, the $199 Microtel Linux PCs from Wal-Mart this year, and this year’s sub-$900 laptops) it’s extremely tempting to run out and buy one. Especially the Sotec, which offers not only a great price, but almost every possible extra.

But remember what happened in the past. Compaq invaded Packard Bell’s territory in 1996 and released an underpowered but reliable and capable PC for $899, complete. Almost immediately, everybody was selling PCs for under $1,000. Then along came eMachines, deciding that even $499 wasn’t cheap enough and offering a unit, again underpowered, for $399. Few matched eMachines’ price point, but most companies were soon offering something for $499.

Laptops aren’t going to bottom out at $849. There’s no point in putting a smaller screen or hard drive in that Sotec. But if Wal-Mart decides it wants a bottom-feeder laptop, it could have Sotec substitute a VIA C3 chip for the Celeron (the Celeron’s being phased out anyway, and Wal-Mart already sells C3-based machines and their sales have proven you don’t have to have Intel Inside in order for people to buy them), and replace the combo DVD/CD-RW drive for a straight DVD drive or even a straight CD-ROM drive. A Sotec 3120x variant with an 800 MHz C3 and a plain old CD-ROM drive could probably sell for $749 or even $699. If Wal-Mart decides to thumb its nose at Microsoft and offer a Linux-based variant, it could chop another $100 off the price. (The big question there is whether it’s possible to support the Sotec’s modem under Linux.)

How soon will it happen? Hard to say. But think about it. Wal-Mart undercut everybody. Everybody reacted quickly. Dell wants to own the laptop market, because it’s part of the PC market. Wal-Mart wants to own every market. They’ll both strike back. HP and Toshiba won’t throw in the towel right away either, because they’re both big in retail laptops.

Right now the Sotecs are selling like crazy. Wal-Mart and Office Depot can’t keep them in stock. They won’t lower prices any further unless Dell and HPQ and Toshiba react again and seriously cut into sales. That’ll depend on whether they’re satisfied with their current sales figures. With 14 shopping days until Christmas (and realistically, the clock running out on shipping something to arrive before Christmas), I don’t expect pricing or inventory conditions to change much in the next two weeks.

But remember, this is Christmas boom time. People always cut prices after Christmas to spur sales. Chipmakers cut their prices too, meaning these laptops will be cheaper to make a month from now.

So if you’ve been wanting a laptop for a while and the sudden appearance of $849 laptops got you thinking but you’re willing to wait a while longer, this is a good time to wait.