UPDATES NOT ALL HELPFUL

Bill Gates went to court again this week to prevent his company from being broken into three companies. I have touted Microsoft's virtue of being one big company and have often had worries about a breakup. If it broken up, communication will not exist between the three companies by order of the court. That will mean trouble, because even being one company does not guarantee that everyone communicates effectively.

While going on the Microsoft free update site (www.microsoft.com/update), I noticed the following upgrade for integrated drive electronics (IDE) support. This upgrade worked flawlessly. Bad news follows. The Windows IDE hard drive cache package provides a way to work around the problem that computers have with combination IDE hard disk drives, large caches and newer, faster processors. This problem has been identified on these computers. Computers with this combination risk losing data if the hard disk shuts down before it can preserve the data in its cache. During shutdown, data from the cache is written to the hard disk for storage until the computer is turned on again. During a typical shutdown process, any data written just before shutdown may still reside on the hard disk's hardware cache. Older processors typically execute the shutdown code slowly enough that the hard disk's cache flushed the written data to the physical media before the machine lost power. As processors have increased in speed, the shutdown time has decreased to the point that data may still be in the hardware cache when a computer is turned off, and that data may be lost. This increased processor time, coupled with the fact that hard drive caches have increased in size, further increases the chance for data loss. This is not a problem that is specific to Windows, nor is it specific to any one brand of processor or hardware. This update is only for Windows ME users and Microsoft plans no upgrade for Windows 95 users. Windows 2000 users don't have to worry since their start up/shutdown process is so slow to start with, all data is flushed from the hard drive with plenty of time to spare.

The bad news is that all free updates are not posted here. I have not been able to discover a reason for this.

The first major update is the Media Player with all kinds of patches and plug-ins. The second one I have found in the last two days is DirectX 8.0, which offers better graphics, faster frame rates and support for massive multiplayer games. It also features more impressive audio when running and displaying programs rich in multimedia elements such as full-color graphics, video, 3-D animation, and surround sound. There is little difference in available space on your hard drive, since DirectX 8.0 will overwrite the earlier version.

Over the last few years it has been my pleasure to receive e-mail from readers, and have been flattered to learn that my articles have been posted on the Internet and sent all over the globe.

I'd like to share with you an example: "I'm a student in Physics from Dublin (Dublin Institute of Technology) and I'm investigating the relationship between dark current' to area ratio in InAsGa and Ge photodetector (PIN). I would like more information about it in your articles."

As always if you have any comments or questions please contact me at rich@digitallabs.com.