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PC questions and answers
by by Jim Sanders - March 31, 2002 at 00:04:57:
The topic for this months meeting was the Shuttle SV24 computer. The first computer that I have ever bought in large part because it was cute. But aside from that, for a case that is about two thirds the size of a tall shoe box, it is quite a bit of computer. The one that I bought was on sale at Fry’s Electronics for $299.00. That is the basic box plus in this instance an Intel 933Mhz P3 CPU. I still had to add memory (256M), a CD-RW, a floppy disk, and a 80G hard disk. In combination with my 15" LCD display, it is far easier to carry to a meeting than my mid-tower case and 17" monitor. The fact that this computer has a single PCI expansion slot has drawn some flak from a couple of people that I know. However, when you consider what comes built into the motherboard, that is not a major problem from my point of view.I installed XP Pro on the system to see how it would handle the hardware and had no problems. I would have used Win2K because I do not like the way XP violates my privacy, but I need to be familiar with XP from a professional stand point. The other reason for installing an NT based OS, was to be able to show the difference between a FAT32 partition and a NTFS partition. I setup four near equal drives, with C:,D:, and E: as FAT32 and F: as NTFS. When I formatted F:, I had the option of choosing the cluster size and picked the 1024 byte selection. I was a little surprised when the format finished and announced that almost 70Meg of the disk had been used as part of the format process. If I had picked the 4096 byte size that number would have been smaller. The FAT32 drive was set up with 16K byte clusters and no choice. When I copied the Office XP CD-ROM to both drives, it was very easy to see the difference in wasted or “slack” space between the two. On the FAT32 partition when I clicked on properties for the office folder, it reported a size of 501M bytes with 532M bytes of disk space used. On the NTFS partition when I clicked on properties for the office folder, it reported a size of 501M bytes with 502M bytes of disk space used. So if I filled each drive with copies of office, I would have, in very round numbers, about 1100M bytes of wasted space on the FAT32 drive and 110M bytes of wasted space on the NTFS drive.
- It has a decent S3 3D video chip,
- 2-IDE,
- 1-Ser.
- 1-Par.
- PS2-KB
- PS2-mouse
- 4-USB (2 in front)
- 2-Firewire
- NTSC and S-Video ports
- 10/100 LAN, !
- sound system with line-in/line-out on the back and mic-in/speaker-out on the front.
The other experiment that I demonstrated was attaching USB mass storage devices to the USB ports to see if they were properly recognized by XP without having to install a driver. The first device I tried on the front USB ports was the QUE! LS240 Superdisk. This unit is USB bus powered and worked right away. It was listed as a 240Mb B: drive. I next tried the “DiskonKey” USB 8Mb flash RAM drive and that worked fine. The next item was a 6Gb 2.5 inch HD in a USB adaptor case. It worked on the first try. I then tried hooking up my Panasonic digital camera which has a built in 120Mb USB LS120 drive. XP did not recognize it.
Next month I am going to explore how the built in sound system of the SV24 works with the VIA Voice 9 voice recognition software.
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