Home & Small Office Computer Guide

Intel has launched its new 3.46 GHz Pentium Extreme Edition 955 & 975X Express chipset today. It scores well in encoding, business desktop and a few other business related areas. However AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor is still a serious competitor especially when it comes to gaming.

You can read a full review at HotHardware.com

A major cause of computer failures is a little, but very expensive problem known as blown caps.

Capacitors (or caps) store electricity and they are used in that capacity in a number of locations on the mother boards that go inside your computer. Capacitors can last for many years and then again they can pop their corks in much less time … although it is unusual for that to happen too quickly.

In this photo you will see part of a motherboard and the capcitors are the tall cylindrical items circled in red and green.

The ones circled in green look quite good - the silver top on each of them appears to be quite flat. If you look at the ones circled in red you will notice that the silver caps are bulging - some perhaps more than others - and that is what a blown cap looks like.

A badly blown capacitor will be leaking brown corrosive fluide down the sides and onto the copper tracks but whether they are mildly blown or badly blown the result is still the same. The computer will begin to malfunction and the motherboard is ruined and needs to be replaced.

In the last week or so Dell announced that they were setting aside $300 million to cover the costs of replacing motherboards with blown caps in swome of their workstations. And now there is a report on Cnet that Hewlett-Packard, Apple and other brands that are using Intel motherboards are all facing similar problems.

I’ve just seen a report that suggests that AMD processors outsold their Intel counterparts in the US for the first time in October.

Sales of desktop computers and notebooks with AMD chips accounted for 49.8 percent of PCs sold in domestic stores compared to Intel’s 48.5 percent according to a report on Cnet.

I have to admit that I’m not really surprised because for some time now I’ve been hearing reports that the latest Intel chip runs HOT and no amount of cooling can keep it at a reasonable temperature. Hot chips tend to cause sudden reboots and that seems to have been the experience of many just lately.

On the other hand AMD manage to keep turning out chips that work and go on working and obviously the heat and reboot issue has caught up with Intel.

The last thing most of us think about when we’re sitting in front of our computers working hard is what processor is inside the computer. As long as it keeps working there’s no need to worry about whether it’s an AMD or an Intel.

And for most of us the processing speed isn’t going to be of great concern either because most of us won’t even notice any discernable difference in the speed between a high-end AMD chip and a low-grade Celeron.

The only time we are ever really going to ponder the question of what processor we want is when the time comes to buy a new computer and the salesman starts asking us for our preference.

At times like that we usually don’t want to appear dumb and we would sometimes like to dazzle the salesperson with our brilliance and so, with that thought in mind I offer you The Right Desktop Processor:CPU/Performance

You will find that it’s a lengthy and in depth look at a number of processors. and if you don’t have time to read everything let me tell you that the bottom line is that there is no definitive winner.

And my personal preference? Well we do a lot of graphical work, we regularly run programmes like Dreamweaver and Photoshop and we have a variety of AMD and Intel processors in our machines and we can’t tell the difference either.

Ask the computer guy who repairs our machines though and he has no doubt. When the customer has no preference he’ll install an AMD chip every time because the latest Intel chips run way too hot for his liking.