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Often we receive some very good questions through our Ask the Experts email. Questions that many of you will need to know the answers to, and quite often questions that some of you may not even know to ask. Well, here we'll be posting some of the more important questions, and our answers, for your perusal. If there is any questions you've been burning to ask, don't hesitate to write us!

The first letter we'll be posting is from an avid reader of our emails. Chuck has been writing us for over a couple month now with various problems and questions. On April 10th he posted the following letter to us:

 

Hey Ben,

With the cable modems I've heard that you have to disable file sharing and the like,'cause you are on a "network" when using a cable modem. Is this true? Just my 2 cents worth.

Thx, Chuck τΏτ

On April 11th Ben posted the following reply (edited to keep it clean). There's lots of useful stuff here read and enjoy!

I've been doing a lot of research, it's, of course, nowhere near finished; however, one of the first things I've learned is that when on a LAN - Always use a second netcard for the cable modem and don't waste money on anything faster than 10baseT, keep it PCI and DO NOT use a Netcard the same as your LAN card. 100baseT for your LAN is preferable.

This setup gives you the first stage in a natural firewall. We are looking into and testing at the front "BlackIce".

For Internet connection sharing it doesn't make sense not to use Microsoft's Internet Connection sharing module that comes with Win98se.

I really HATE running background programs; being a computer engineer, I fully understand that what makes a computer work is Memory Memory Memory. Running anything in the background is going to cause a hit and software can't be made for MS Windows NON-BUGGY. I may be unreasonable here but I am a performance NUT. Keeping a computer running naturally is one big PAIN-IN-THE-BUTT, never mind loading it down with BS. I know we need to protect our systems from the "A-HOLES" out there but I hate setting my systems up for a fall and running "crap" (resident memory programs) in the background is the way to the infamous "Blue Screen of Death".

I'm Taking off here, so please excuse me.

I firmly believe today's computers are the equivalent of the original "Model T Automobiles" - All you need to TOP OUT the aggravation would be a crank to start the dang thing.

In 25 years, the new generation of computer users and geeks will think we were absolutely crazy to deal with these arcane pieces of crap. They'll have remarks like " How could anyone work on or with a computer you can't talk to" or "Those clunkers couldn't even find a bug in their own programming" or "They didn't even know when its own hardware was not working properly"

In today's computers, you can't afford to waste memory; basically there is never enough and processing power as well as speed is way to slow for "Real Time".

By 2005 Computers will be running, probably, a 10GHz CPU, 1gig of memory, 1,000X 3D performance, and 100GB hard drives as the bottom line.

The next couple of three years you'll be hearing a lot about "Quantum Processors"

These are my checks on REALITY.

Think of this as the Stone Age - Bottom Line.

Signing off, for now,
Ben Varela

 

Boy, Ben really got rolling on that one, didn't he? He really gets all hot about this stuff. But of course, getting hot and into these problems are what makes us different from the other guy. We try and approach our problems with the typical user in mind. A common phrase mentioned in our shop is "I don't know how the typical user is supposed to know this, much less understand it. " It's true! The normal user who just wants to turn on the computer check their email and maybe play a few games has no IDEA how convoluted these things are. They are not simple machines. They are, as Ben said "aggravating" and I think that's an understatement. Typically, What the user sees is only the tip of the iceberg. While they may say to us "My system seems to operate normally except when I run (insert your most useful application here)", they may not know that underneath the calm and placid waters of the Windows desktop lies the most confusing and complicated OS in the history of computers. Everything is interconnected and related, and a fault in one program can "trickle down" (for all you Reaganomics fans out there) to all the other programs on the PC. never mind what happens if a piece of hardware goes funny. Not bad, funny. As the boss-man sayeth "Everything runs on Memory" And god help the user with RAM that's working but not properly. You'll get no warning from the system and hiccups may be few and far between, but these problems spread, slowly throughout the computer. Every program load may have a few tiny errors caused by the "funny" RAM. Problems that will, trust me, rear their ugly heads one day. And when that happens, no amount of loading Windows 98 will help. Sometimes, if the RAM is acting funny and slowly getting worse, Windows 98 won't even reload! It's a scary world out there in computer land. Complex and totally unreasonable. It's nice to have someone looking out for you, isn't it?

And that's my two cent's worth! -Shawn