Is AMD talking porky pies about Athlon 64 supplies?

[We reserve the right to edit letters. We never publish people's email addresses, and if readers request it, we don't publish their names either. Ed.]

AMD denies Athlon 64 shortage

I think AMD are talking porky pies or at least half truths. I started looking of AMD64 XP3500 90nM parts in the beginning of November. There where plenty available then but I held of buying as I had read here that AMD would be having a Xmas special on processors. Since the end of November none of my normal suppliers have stock of the 90nM parts but do seem to have plenty of stock of the 130nM parts. My guess is AMD is try to clear its 130nM parts, most likely, or they really are having yield problems at 90nM.

I think we deserve the truth! www.shg.biz are quoting early jan delivery for a Athlon64, 3500+, 2.2 GHz, 512kb Cache, 0.09 Micron, Komplett.se have stopped listing 90nM Athlon64 completely and the story is much the same at other places online in Sweden.

I wanted one for Xmas. *sob*

tony

[We've had other letters in the same vein. Ed.]

Wintasks 5 Professional: A Windows background boffin

Your recent "hidden advertising" for WinTasks 5 Professional is soo low ...

And if you want to know why:

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

Name supplied

Hello

I just read your review, it might be nice to have a look at -years old- Kerio Firewall 3 that kept track of all disk, register, lan/internet access as well as keeping track of applications that are performing actions. Not only could you keep an eye on it, you could also allow or prevent such access or be warned. It was great to see what installation program try to access! Wintask5, as judged from this review,is just a very simple tool in comparison and one that comes late. Nothing special in my book. For those who want to be utter control freak on their win box, try Kerio 3.

Edo Broekman

I suggest you instead check out Process Explorer done by the folks at sysinternals.com. The two people there (Mark Ruissinovich and Bryce Cogswell) are deep Windows internals experts and have done several tools, all of which are free.

For example Process Explorer shows may more than Wintasks and can also replace the task manager. You can also see the network connections held by each task, the strings in the binary, what handles are open and for svchost.exe you can see what services each instance is hosting.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

Their Regmon and Filemon tools let you see what registry and file accesses are happening on your system (did you know Yahoo Messenger scans its flash directory every second?) I can't recommend their programs (which work on all versions of Windows) or their knowledge highly enough. I have no relation to them or their site other than as a satisfied user for many years.

Roger

Mozilla Thunderbird email is go

I really feel that Thunderbird has fallen into Firefox's shadow to the point where new releases are barely mentioned....

However, Thunderbird really is a convenient mail client... I especially like the way it handles RSS feeds in a way that gives the impression of another inbox. One thing it lacks is really "good" message threading.

One of the best things about Thunderbird is that it runs equally well, with equal features, on both Linux and Windows platforms. I believe it also runs on OSX, but I haven't looked into it myself. The benefits of this are many, but the one I find most beneficial is that on either Windows or Linux, you're presented with a very user-friendly common interface. For those transitioning from Windows into another os, Firefox and Thunderbird are possibly the two most "familiar" apps, even if you haven't used them before.

Wade

One in five buy their software via spam

There are only three guarantees in life. Death, taxes, and that I will roll my eyes if I read about a BSA report on piracy.

Where is the science behind the claim that 20% of Brits buy software? I have my doubts that 20% of people even respond to spam these days. Not only that, but there are many who would not dare buy anything online, ever.

Instead of spending money to promote questionable data, why doesn't the BSA do something progressive to reduce piracy? Instead they should:

-stop gouging the people who buy their software -spend money on fixing bugs other than the most the most debilitating ones
-improve software enough that consumers will want to upgrade to the next version instead of blackmailing us by refusing to provide security updates

Drew Roberts

ATI says it can kill Nvidia

Please publish this comment if possible:

This is the biggest load of BS from ATI so far.

I had Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 Pro and I spent a year uninstalling old and installing new drivers that promised to solve game and other issues.

First it was Star Wars: KoTOR game of the year by many reviewers and fans. They took their sweet time to fix crash to desktop issue (that was just one of them -- check forums at bioware.com). It took from Catalyst 3.8 to Catalyst 4.11 to finally patch that buggy OpenGL code. Not to mention that some versions in between were so slow that the game become unplayable.

At one moment ATI decided to forbid use of 3-rd party gamma setting utilities. It was Catalyst 4.3 and funny enough it was the version Microsoft integrated into SP2.

Not to mention that Anti-Aliasing settings were not sticking throughout the games. You could only force it from the ATI control panel and have it on for all games.

Then it was the ugliest bug I ever saw -- I tried to turn on Large System Cache option in Windows XP Pro to see if I can have any benefit from 1 GB of RAM. But no, due to an ATI bug (STILL UNFIXED! -- check it out http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4217.html) your data on hard drive gets corrupted. Thank you ATI! You don't know a sh*t about writing good drivers.

Now to the good part. I got myself PCI-Express version of GeForce 6600. I was happy with the first version of nVidia drivers that supported this card. It had some rendering issues with NFSU 2 but they got fixed in 66.93 which is the driver I am currently using. I have just finished Half-Life 2 without any problems, I can turn on Large System Cache without fear of data corruption, KoTOR runs fine too, Anti-Aliasing settings stay the way I set them from within the game, and 2D as well as video performance are great. So I am a happy customer and I am glad that nVidia got back to their feet after all that kicking they got from ATI. And even if not for all this I would vote for nVidia because they support open industry standards like OpenGL and OpenEXR where ATI goes with Volish proprietary COM junk called DirectX. Just my 2 cents.

I Levicki

Hard Drives: The Last of the Letters

The distinction between OEM and retail makes a lot more sense than it might seem on the surface. Some of the extra cost in the retail product is the cost of the warranty itself (maintaining spare parts/drives for the requisite number of years, administrative costs, etc.), but there is more to it than that.

I used to work for a major US distributor of computer hardware and components. I remember competing with gray market drives all the time, and many manufacturers worked diligently to try to maintain integrity in their channel.

It was easy for large manufacturers and system integrators to buy drives at great prices and sell off their surplus. Many times they would be induced to buy more drves than they would normally take (end of quarter, end of month, etc.) to get a special price, and then blow the surplus out the back door at a profit to make their effective component cost even less.

We would complain about trying to compete with some kid who was selling drives (printers, etc.) out of his garage that he bought at ridiculous prices.

Manufcturers saved money on having an OEM product because they only shipped one set of documentation per pallette, and can ship more drives per pallette - saving on shipping costs), etc. Additionally, the the mfr. would expect the OEM to provide first level support (internally), and use more efficient RMA procedures (bulk RMA's, etc.) Costs of sales per drive is much lower to a bulk buyer that provides his own support, and doesn't need all the niceties of retail packaging.

The OEM price is less because it acutally does cost the manufacturer less. Additionally, killing warranty support for out of channel product was a way of disincenting buyers from buying gray market goods and competing with legitimate channels that promoted their products and had infrastructure support costs (facilities, people, support), inventory committments, etc.

Additionally, low end integrators would buy gray product out of channel and then expect the manufacturer to provide all the support. This ticked off the distributors, and cost the manufacturer money to support OEM goods that were intended for manufacturers, who normally would consolidate those costs for them.

Name supplied

Hi, Mike

Thanks for putting the article up. I see that it has tweaked a few people to reply to it.

I just wanted to clarify, since a few people had commented on it, that these drives are fully shrink- wrapped, RETAIL drives; the part number even ends in -RK, for Retail Kit. Not only that, but they were purchased from CDW, which is a Seagate Authorized Retail Reseller, as seen on Seagate's own website.

I thought I did everything right here, and it's looking like no one is willing to step up to the plate (or wicket, for that matter), and own up to the fraud that seems to be happening here. Incidentally, my rep at CDW said these are Retail drives, too. She suggested that I return them all, and buy directly from Seagate.

No, that won't be happening. Just give me my 5 year warranty, in WRITING, and I'll be happy.

Thanks again

Bob S. / St. Paul, MN