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Undilah PAS : MENENTANG KEZALIMAN & MENEGAKKAN KEADILAN
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Assalamualaikum,
Pameran Komputer Microfest 1999
di PWTC daripada 12 Nov 1999 Hingga 14 Nov 1999
11am - 9pm
Antara yang menarik adalah
User Group Forums.
LINUX pada 12 Nov 1999
Mac USER pada 13 Nov 1999
PALM Device pada 14 Nov 1999.
Ini adalah panduan yang Haris petik daripada dunia-digital
Nak joint Dunia-digital hantarkan email kepada
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 99 19:00:49 +0000
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Shopping tips for PC Fair
Shopping tips for PC Fair
There’s no doubt shopping for all your IT needs at PC Fair ’99 is an experience in
itself.
The convenience of having all IT products and services at bargain prices under one
roof
is one of the main reasons for
PC Fair’s ongoing success.
Being the biggest and favourite PC Cash and Carry event in the country will of course
attract hundreds of thousands of visitors. So like any smart shopper who plans to
tackle
the crowd, you’d be well advised to prepare yourself for the shopping experience of
your
lifetime.
By preparing for your shopping at PC Fair ’99, you’ll get to make good use of your
time
spent for the day. And you’ll be surprised how enjoyable your excursion to the event
can
be if you know where to look for your shopping items.
To prepare yourself, it’s a good idea to start off by creating a list of items that
you
need to buy from PC Fair ’99. By creating a list, you’ll know exactly what you need to
buy and be able to visit the relevant vendors to compare prices and features. Having a
shopping list will also help you discover if there are any other items that may be
required such as cables, adapters and so on.
Once you’ve prepared your list make sure that whatever equipment you need to buy will
work with your existing IT products. There’s nothing more disheartening than to
discover
that your newly purchased serial port mouse does not work on your PC that accepts
only a
PS/2 mouse port.
With the list in hand the next thing to do is decide how much you are prepared to
spend
on each item. If you are unsure of how much each item actually costs the next best
thing
to do is to set a minimum and maximum price ceiling that you think you can afford.
Once you’ve worked out your budget, set aside enough cash to go shopping since most
items
sold at PC Fair ’99 will be on a cash and carry basis. For some higher value items,
certain vendors may be prepared to accept credit card payment. You’ll have to check
with
individual vendors to see if that’s possible.
In most cases, the purchase of large items such as PCs may require only a deposit
payment
with the balance paid upon delivery to your home.
Again you’ll have to check with the vendor to see if he provides delivery and whether
extra charges will be incurred.
Now that you have your shopping list and money prepared, it’s time to visit PC Fair
’99.
If you have an opportunity, study the layout of the booths so that you know where
some of
the vendors you want to visit are located. This information is usually provided at the
venue and also in publications such Computimes. Keep the floor plan handy as this will
save you time in locating the right vendors.
Carry a small notepad and pen to take down notes and prices. If your shopping list
contains many small items and you’re not keen on carrying multiple bags from vendors,
then consider bringing along a knapsack so that you can put everything together.
It’s advisable to check around for prices and compare features before deciding on your
purchase. Remember that you are not obliged to buy just because you approached one
vendor
and he has spent time explaining the virtues of a product to you. Most vendors will
understand that you’re looking at options and most will be more than happy to offer
views
on the pros and cons of each option available.
Pick up brochures and leaflets that are provided by vendors so that you can compare
features and prices. If more information is required to help you decide on your
purchase
just ask the vendor. Don’t be afraid to ask questions because the vendors will not
know
what you want unless you tell them. There’ll be a lot of shoppers on that day so make
sure you have an idea of what you’re looking for so that the vendor can help you with
your queries.
Always take note of the prices of each item that you want to buy and give yourself
some
time to compare features relative to the prices. As a general rule, two similar items
may
be priced differently due to factors such as brand name (common among personal
computers), features and bundled offers such as software or other peripherals.
Once you’ve narrowed down your choices approach the vendors and go into further
details
on price and discounts. Generally, personal computers, notebooks and other large
hardware
items will offer discounts as opposed to software and smaller peripherals like a
mouse or
a joystick. Nevertheless, there is no harm asking if the prices can be discounted
since
most vendors would want your business even if it means reducing their profit margins
by a
little.
Always start your shopping early or at least give yourself enough time to buy whatever
you need. Experience shows that most shoppers tend to visit the event more than just
once. The first visit is usually an opportunity to get an idea of what’s available
and to
compare prices. The subsequent visits will see shoppers making their purchases.
Vendors
at PC Fair realise this trend as well and as the event draws to a close, most vendors
will offer more discounts on selected items. The last day of the event is usually most
exciting when some vendors will constantly reduce prices to clear out stock.
Suffice to say, the entire atmosphere at PC Fair ’99 will be akin to a bazaar and
shoppers will be snapping up items as fast as they can on the last day of the event.
While this may be a good strategy for some shoppers, bear in mind also that waiting
too
long may result in you not getting to buy the items you want for reasons of it being
sold
out.
Hence a balance must be struck and it is really up to shoppers to decide if they are
prepared to wait a day longer before buying or just getting the item when the price
falls
within their budget.
To finish off, here’s a list of practical do’s and don’ts to keep in mind when you
visit
PC Fair ’99 at a town near you.
Do
Create a list of items that you need to buy (priority) and another list for items
that you desire if the price is right.
Make sure that the items you want to buy will work with your existing IT
products at
home.
An estimated calculation of how much you have to spend and can afford.
Bring enough money but be careful how you handle it.
Check the booth layout plan so that you can plan your shopping journey.
Pick up leaflets and brochures to compare prices and features.
Ask questions if you’re unsure about anything.
Jot down notes, prices and discounts offered.
Give yourself enough time to decide on your purchases.
Start your shopping early or give yourself ample time to visit the event.
Ask for discounts and haggle prices (if you’re an expert in this art of
bargaining).
Don’t
Go unprepared unless you really have no plans to buy anything.
Wait till the last minute to buy because the item you want may be sold out.
Feel obliged to buy an item unless you’re totally satisfied with the offer made.
Haggle prices just for the sake of haggling.
-------------------------------
Upgrade considerations
With PC Fair just around the corner, many users will be keen to take advantage of
this
opportunity to upgrade their existing IT assets. Depending on how old your PC is and
the
level of your computing expertise, an upgrade urge is likely to crop up as new and
better
technology emerges in the market.
In normal circumstances, a PC upgrade would involve adding more RAM and installing
new
software. Or perhaps a new printer or scanner is required. Hard disk space constraints
may also arise and in this instance, depending on how adventurous you are, a new hard
disk may be added into your PC.
An alternative to increasing hard disk space without going through the somewhat
laborious effort in adding a new hard disk is to use high capacity diskettes to backup
your rarely accessed data. Offerings such as Imation's Superdisk or the popular Iomega
Zip and Jazz drives are common options among many users today.
For more experienced users, maybe upgrading their PC's processor or motherboard is
due
and that is entirely their choice. Various technical publications provide a
step-by-step
guide to do this, but most novices are better advised to recruit professional help. No
matter what the upgrade plans are, the best place to get the biggest bargains is
definitely at PC Fair, Malaysia's biggest and favourite PC cash & carry event.
This article will help users figure out the different features in more common
peripherals such as printers, scanners, keyboards, and mouse.
Printers
A printer is normally the most common peripheral that PC users have in their
possession.
At PC Fair some vendors will offer a printer as part of a bundled package with their
PCs.
This makes it very convenient for users since they need not have to fork out extra
money
to buy the printer. Of course if you don't already own a printer, then selecting your
first printer will entail some work on your part. To simplify the task it is helpful
to
determine your printing requirements and narrow the choice.
Naturally, printers vary in size, speed, sophistication, and cost. Personal printers
can
be distinguished as impact or non-impact printers. Early impact printers worked
something
like an automatic typewriter, with a key striking an inked impression on paper for
each
printed character. The dot-matrix printer is a popular low cost impact printer that
strikes the paper a line at a time.
The best known non-impact printers in the market today are the inkjet printer and
laser
printer. The way an inkjet printer works is such that ink is sprayed from an ink
cartridge at very close range to the paper as it rolls by. Various vendors name their
inkjet printers differently according to the printing technology used, but they can
generally be grouped under the same class.
The more popular inkjet printers are from the likes of Canon, Epson and
Hewlett-Packard.
A laser printer, on the other hand, uses a laser beam to produce an image that
eventually
appears as printed output. The image is created as an array of very fine dots. The
use of
a laser in this way allows the creation of very fine, detailed images, either text or
pictures. Laser printers are also generally more expen-sive than inkjet printers and
the
most popular laser printers are from Hewlett-Packard.
The key features of laser printers are their speed, resolution and paper handling. As
they use a non-impact printing technology laser printers are very quiet, and many
users
regard the lack of noise as an important buying criterion for office use. A few laser
printers can print colour images, but most are monochrome devices.
Some printer qualities of most interest to users are:
Colour: Colour is important for users who need to print pages for
presentations and other pages where colour is part of the information. Colour
printers can also be set to print only in black-and-white. Colour printers are
more
expensive to operate since they use two ink cartridges (one colour and one black
ink) that need to be replaced after a certain number of pages. Users who don't
have
a specific need for colour and who print a lot of pages will find a
black-and-white
printer cheaper to operate.
Resolution: Printer resolution (the sharpness of text and images on paper)
is
usually measured in dots per inch (dpi). Most print-ers provide sufficient
resolution at 600 dpi while the higher end inkjet printers are capable of
resolutions of up to 1440 dpi.
Speed: If you do much printing, the speed of the printer becomes important.
Inexpensive printers print only about 3 to 6 sheets per minute while colour
printing
is slower.Memory: Most printers come with a small amount of memory that can be
upgraded by the user. Having more than the minimum amount of memory is helpful
and
faster when printing out pages with large images or tables with lines around them
that the printer treats as a large image.
I/O Interface: The most common I/O interface for printers has been the
parallel Centronics interface with a 36-pin plug. New printers and computers are
likely to use a serial interface. With further developments in I/O technology
users
can expect to see more printers offering USB or Firewire interfaces which offer a
smaller and less cumbersome plug.
Scanners
A scanner captures images from photographic prints, posters, magazine pages, and
similar
sources for computer editing and display. Scanners come in hand-held, feed-in, and
flatbed types and for scanning black-and-white only or colour.
Very high-resolution scanners are used for scanning for high resolution printing, but
lower resolution scanners are adequate for capturing images for computer
display.Typically, a scanner should offer at least 600 x 1200 dpi resolu-tion for
reasonable quality scanned-in images. Some high-end scan-ners can offer up to 9600 x
9600
dpi resolution or even higher.
If you use a scanner frequently, then a flatbed scanner would be your best option
since
it provides the best quality scans as compared to hand-held or feed-in
scanners.Scanners
usually come with some image editing software that lets you resize and otherwise
modify a
captured image.
One other type of software that you will find useful when buying a scanner is optical
character recognition (OCR) software. OCR software allows the recognition of printed
or
written text characters by a PC. This involves photo scanning of the text
character-by-character, analysis of the scanned-in image, and then translation of the
character image into character codes, such as ASCII, commonly used in data processing.
Some major manufacturers of scanners include Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Microtek
and
Umax.
Keyboards and mouse
Most keyboards available today are known as enhanced keyboards meaning that it has
more
than the normal 101 keys. The popular 104 keys enhanced keyboards are designed
specifically for use with PCs that run on Windows 95 or Windows 98.
Other enhanced features that you might find on these keyboards include controls for
speaker volume, shortcuts to launching applications and Internet access. Microsoft's
ergonomic keyboard is very unique in that the keypads are split into two sections thus
allowing your hands to rest in a comfortable position to reduce repetitive strain
injuries. Better quality keyboards generally provide a tactile response when the
keypads
are pressed although this sense of feel is very much a subjective matter from one
user to
another.
The design of pointing devices or mouse has over the years become a science in
itself in
response to enhanced graphical user inter-faces in computing. Apart from the normal
two
or three button mouse, other popular designs include the trackball and trackpad. One
other feature that has been in the market for quite some time is the scroll button.
With the scroll button nestled between two mouse buttons, many users have found it
much
easier to view and scroll through pages displayed on web browsers and some other
applications that are capable of supporting this page scrolling feature. Some popular
mouse manufacturers include Microsoft, Logitech and Genius.
All keyboards and mouse support either the serial or PS/2 port on PCs. The serial
port
is an adapter that has nine pins while the PS/2 port features a small round plug-like
adapter. Make sure you know what ports your PC can support before making your
purchase.
More articles...
-----------------
Basics in buying a PC
With practically hundreds of PCs to choose from at PC Fair, shoppers will no doubt
have
a daunting task deciding which one to buy. Since vendors package their PCs in
different
configurations to suit the myriad needs of users trying to compare one against another
based on price alone would be futile.
And with PC technology moving at breakneck speed nowadays, it’s practically
impossible
to get the best today and not be disappointed next month. This is especially true with
microprocessors in personal computers.
This amazing phenomenon in technology advancement can be attributed to Moore's Law
which
states that the pace of microchip technology change is such that the amount of data
storage that a microchip can hold doubles every year or at least every 18 months.
Since it’s unlikely that users can keep up with the pace, one way to determine which
PC
would best suit you is to base your purchase decision according to your computing
requirements. When looking into your computing needs bear in mind that it should at
least
cover a period of at least 12 to 18 months.
Another consideration to take into account would be your budget. Obviously the type
of
configuration for your new PC will very much depend on how much you are prepared to
spend.
If you use your PC mainly for word processing, spreadsheets and the like then
blazingly
fast computing speed may not really be necessary. If on the other hand you expect to
play
a lot of PC games and surf the Internet -- who doesn’t nowadays -- then some
consideration would have to be given to processor speed, and other components such as
video graphics card, modem and random access memory (RAM). By buying a higher
processor,
it minimise the chances of your PC becoming obselete and it gives you enough headroom
for
future upgrades.
What to look for
The ability to differentiate between competing PC components would require some
advanced
understanding of the PC technology and computing terminology. In this article
however, we
will attempt only to provide a basic understanding of buying a packaged PC that comes
with standard components.
Most PCs today are relatively fast in terms of processor speed and most would be good
enough for operating simple office automation applications. The PC market now is
predominantly based on Celeron and processors from AMD, Cyrix and WinChip.
Without venturing into technicalities and specific details, the rule of thumb is such
that the higher the clock speed or MHz rating the faster the processor is in
processing
data and computing instructions. Of course, all this is relative to each processor
class
being the AMD K6-2, AMD K6-3 and AMD K-7. Hence, you will find that a vendor’s
particular
configuration for a single PC will have different prices according to the processor
that
is installed.
Another aspect of PC speed to consider is random access memory (RAM). RAM is the
place
in a computer where the operating system, application programs, and data in current
use
are kept so that they can be quickly reached by the computer's processor.
PCs today use Synchronous Dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) while some vendors
still
offer the relatively slower Extended Data Output RAM (EDO RAM) in their systems. Apart
from slower processing speeds, other disadvantages of EDO RAM include more power
consumption and upgrades of EDO RAM modules must be in pairs. SDRAM, on the other
hand,
need only be populated in single module increments in current systems.
Most standard PCs come equipped with at least 32MB to 64MB of RAM and increments are
usually in multiples of 8MB. The amount of RAM that you have in your PC is quite
important because having more RAM capacity can often augment the slower processors. If
you can afford it there is no harm in upping your PC’s RAM to at least 96MB or more.
Generally, hard disk capacity found in PCs today are at least 4 gigabytes and above.
This amount of space is sufficient for most purposes. When it comes to modems, there
is
really not much of a difference between an internal and external option. But do make
sure
that the modem can support connection speeds of up to 56Kbps and that it complies with
the V.90 communications standard. Anything less would be a compromise that you do not
want to accept.
As with monitors, the minimum requirement would be a 15” digital monitor that can
support at least 256 colours and resolution of up to 800x600 dpi.
For PC games enthusiasts, one very important component to look for when buying a PC
is
the availability of a 3-D graphics accelerator card. Graphics accelerators speed up
the
displaying of images on the monitor making it possible to achieve effects not
otherwise
possible -- for example, the presentation of very large images or of interactive
games in
which images need to change quickly in response to user input.
Many new PCs are now sold with a graphics accelerator built in. The power of a
graphics
accelerator can be extended further if the personal computer is equipped with the
Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), a bus interface between the computer components
involved
in image display. Intel, which has taken the lead in developing its specifications,
has
built AGP into a chipset for its Pentium II processor. The newer, faster Pentium IIs
are
designed to work with the AGP chipset.
Some of the popular 3-D graphics accelerators to look out for include 3Dfx Voodoo,
3DLabs Permedia 2, ATI 3D Rage Pro, Intel i740, nVidia Riva 128, and Rendition V2200.
Other standard components in a PC are the bundled operating system (which is most
likely
Windows 98), keyboard, mouse, floppy disk and CD-ROM drives. Most of these other
components have rather standard features except for maybe the CD-ROM drive that comes
in
various speeds. Naturally, the faster the spin rate the better it is but don’t expect
to
see much difference between say, a 16X and 24X CD-ROM drive.
With all these considerations in mind you can now be more prepared to narrow down
your
choice for a PC based on your needs and budget. Take some time to study the PC
advertisements in various IT publications and when you’re ready it’s time to go visit
PC
Fair – Malaysia’s biggest and all-time favourite PC cash & carry event.
1/4
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