Computing: The State of the Union

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Things have been relatively quiet on the computing front over the past year or so. If you take the thickness of PC Pro magazine as a bench mark it has shrunk to 180 pages where it used to be almost twice that thickness. Most of the loss has been advertising pages, but it reflects the state of the industry. Laptops have overtaken desk tops as the most prevalent kit in the home and the entertainment features have started to dominate. The laptop has become a fashion icon and the demand for thinner and more stylish devices has led to smaller batteries and less performance. Their screens have taken a turn for the worse, they are now almost all very shiny, too bright for graphics use and interfere with calibration spectros. Facilities such as CompactFlash sockets, once frequent, are now a rarity. In many cases even a DVD player cannot be squeezed into the pencil-thin devices.

Talker using projector and computer sfotware to aid his speech

The headlines for computers are something like this:

1. Windows 7 has become the de facto choice in the domestic PC market. A few professionals have stayed on XP but many have jumped over Vista to Windows 7. Vista remains the dog it has always been.

2. 64-bit processing and software has made significant inroads and brought a raft of compatibility and legacy issues along with it.

3. Solid-state hard drives have become common in the higher specification laptops. They are silent, require less battery power and are robust.

Laptop Laptop Ports

4. With 64-bit processing the RAM limits have been lifted (effectively limitless) and so many machines use 4GB or more. On the downside some makers have started using 3GB chipsets which means that instead of RAM increments of 2, 4, 6, 8GB you now run 3, 6, 12GB so that you can maintain matched pairs, effectively forcing you to buy more than you may need or wish for.

5. Hard drives of 2 TB (terabytes) are now common and inexpensive.

6. BluRay has made little progress, DVD still rules and CD ROMs are becoming quite rare.

7. The iPad has been launched and is even more annoying than an iPhone as you can see its greater form from further away – the gadget freaks are in heaven!

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