PCs

Note: if you wish, you can jump straight to my security advice.

When people ask me what brand of PC to buy, my first question is their level of technical ability, because that makes a huge difference in the advice I give.

For a geek like me, who has no compunction about "popping the hood" and fiddling around with the guts of the machine, the best brand is really no brand at all, but rather the kind of no-name clone assembled by or for any number of "Mom & Pop" computer shops. That is partly because, if something goes wrong, I'll probably be fixing it myself, so the level of support (or lack thereof) for that brand isn't an issue. It's also because no-name clones use industry standard components. They can't afford to play all the little games which the big brands play to try to lock users into their brand. On the other hand, for people who want to be able to call a support line any time something goes wrong, a brand name is more appropriate. If the machine is a little harder to work on, that's not really a problem, because this kind of user has no intention of making the attempt.

Another factor to consider is where the computer is going to be used. If you are in or near a big city with lots of computer shops and service depots, then any "second tier" brand with at least one authorised service depot near you should be a workable solution. On the other hand, if you work in a remote area, or travel with your computer, then you will want a brand with a global service network, which restricts you to considering "first tier" brands, or else a "second tier" brand which has service depots where you are most likely to be working.

That said, I have a few "pet hates" which I have developed over the years, and I never recommend those brands, even when the price and features appear to be attractive. Basically, I recommend against buying anything from Dell, Gateway, or Packard-Bell, or buying printers from Hewlett-Packard.

The brands which I do recommend, I recommend with some reservations. IBM, for example, made themselves extremely unpopular with geeks back in the late 80s, when they had a reputation for being arrogant, and trying to control the personal computer market. When they introduced the PS/2 line, they introduced a new bus (MCA) and a new operating system (OS/2), neither of which succeeded in the market, even though both had technical advantages over the de facto standards of the day. Basically, the IT community turned its back on IBM, and IBM suffered a huge loss of market share. Since then, IBM has turned itself around, and come out with some very innovative hardware. And, I do have to admit that every time I have dealt with IBM's service people, they have been superlative. (IBM has always counted on superior customer service as a competitive advantage.) However, now that IBM selling its PC unit to Lenovo, the question is whether Lenovo will carry on that high level of service, or simply try to cash in on the IBM name. Only time will tell. In any case, IBM has come out with some pretty cool technology in the past few years. I do find working inside IBM desktops and towers kind of fiddly (although their notebooks are remarkably accessible), but since the kind of person who should be buying a name brand machine doesn't plan to work on it anyway, I suppose that really shouldn't be a factor. (And, I have to admit, there is currently an IBM among the collection of PCs in my office.) Among the IBM inventions which I like is the TrackPoint, that little "pencil eraser" which you can see in the middle of the keyboard on some IBM notebooks such as the ThinkPad X42 [Amazon.com] (which also has a fingerprint reader to keep other people from reading your data, even if they steal your notebook.) IBM has all kinds of studies to show how much more efficient a TrackPoint is than a touch pad, or even a mouse. (Although I have to admit that not everybody prefers the TrackPoint, for me, it's essential in a notebook, because I generate so much static electricity in my body that it drives touch pads crazy, which in turn drives me crazy.) You can also get the TrackPoint on a keyboard for use with your desktop [Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk] if, like me, you have so much clutter on your desk that it's hard to keep a clear spot for your mouse. I also have to admit that, while you can still pay though the nose for an IBM with all the bells and whistles, it's also true that some models, like the ThinkCentre A50 [Amazon.com], can be surprisingly inexpensive.

Hewlett-Packard and Compaq both had reputations for building good hardware, and Compaq, in particular, seemed to have a gift for tweaking the most speed possible out of the underlying chipset. On the other hand, both brands are in my bad books for the little proprietary games they play to try to keep their customers hooked. (For example, having non-standard drive mounting brackets which come free when you buy one of their drives, but cost a pretty penny if you want to buy them separately, making it more difficult to install a third-party drive.) Therefore, it was no great surprise to me when HP bought Compaq a few years ago. Oddly enough, they have still retained Compaq as a separate brand, and thus you can get home and business models of towers, desktops, and notebooks (plus, of course, servers) with either the HP or Compaq brand on them. Despite my frustration with their non-standard innards, I do have to admit that both brands are well-made, and, as with IBM, since I'd recommend them to people who don't plan to service their computers themselves, the finicky innards are a problem of HP/Compaq's service depots, rather than you, my gentle readers. (And, yes, I also have a Compaq and an HP sitting beside Tertius.)

I should also mention Toshiba, even though it's rare to see Toshiba desktops in North America, because they have long been a force in the laptop/notebook market. I've always been pleased with the Toshibas which I have used.

There are any number of "second tier" PC brands, and most of them are fairly competent. Aside from Dell, Gateway, and Packard-Bell, I can't recall a brand which has consistently given me trouble. Even brands which have gone into bankruptcy and then been "resurrected" (like AST) can be good buys. As I said before, it's all about whether there is an authorised service depot where you are likely to be with your computer.

But, as I said, for my own use, I prefer the no-name clones, because they have to use all industry-standard parts, so adding or upgrading something inside the case is no hassle. Whenever possible, I specify an AMD processor, because I have no intention of paying a premium price for that little "Intel Inside" sticker on the outside of the box, when, in my experience, AMD chips are every bit as fast, or faster. (Actually, up until last year, I had only owned PCs with AMD chips, and I have never had a CPU fail.) Actually, chip speeds are so insanely fast these days that, unless somebody is consistently doing processor-intensive operations (such as, say, rendering 3-D images for the next Pixar film), I recommend ordering the slowest and cheapest CPU chip which is still shipping, and putting the money saved into boosting the RAM and disk space. The vast majority of PCs are shipped with woefully inadequate RAM, and so their blistering fast CPUs spend most of the time twiddling their digital thumbs while waiting for the hard drive to deliver up data held in virtual memory, so choosing a slower processor and boosting the RAM will almost invariably give you much better overall performance.

Software

Of course, once you've got your PC, you need software. Your first decision is an operating system. Personally, I am a big believer in technological diversity. It worries me that so much of the world is using one hardware platform (Intel), one operating system (Microsoft Windows), one productivity suite (Microsoft Office), one browser (Internet Explorer), and one E-mail client (either Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.) When there is a technological monoculture like that, conditions are ripe for a major disaster caused by a single point of weakness. As an analogy, I direct you to history, and specifically the Irish potato famine of the mid-19^th century. The potato had become the staple food in Ireland, so when a potato blight hit the country, there was widespread famine, because the blight affected virtually every field. Because there was an agricultural monoculture, there were no other food crops for people to fall back on when the potato crop failed. In the same way, the Internet-connected world is ripe for a cascading failure caused by a worm or virus. Thus far, the most widespread viruses have clogged networks, and generally cost companies thousands of dollars to eliminate, but we have yet to see a really widespread virus which does things like format hard drives. Should a deliberately destructive virus like that become widespread, the world will be helpless, just as the Irish were. Therefore, you know that I am not going to recommend any product from Microsoft. (Although if you must use Windows, at least upgrade to Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Security holes in older versions of Windows are no longer being fixed.)

There are tons of people out there boosting Linux, and almost as many willing to tell you why their current favourite distribution is the best. I can't recommend any particular distribution, because I simply can't keep up with the changing whims of my Linux-using friends. (There's one guy on a mailing list I'm on who changes his opinions so frequently about which distribution is best that the other users accuse him of being a member of the "distro of the month club." It's certainly true that he seems to spend more time installing and tweaking various distributions than using them.) In my opinion, any Linux distribution which you are happy with, and which is regularly updated with security patches, should be fine. You can find links to a number of Linux distributions at Linux Online! However, there are other operating system options for PC hardware, many of them free. You have probably heard of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and QNX, but you may not have heard that Sun Microsystems has recently made Solaris, their UNIX-based operating system, available for free. If you're more adventurous, you may want to explore more exotic options like BeOS or Darwin.

For applications, many PCs come bundled with Microsoft Office, not simply because of the technological monoculture issue, but because there are literally thousands of viruses which depend upon Office's scripting system to run. If you're not running Office, then those viruses can't infect your system. On the Software page of the Computer Re-use Optimisation Project, I refer to several free productivity packages, like OpenOffice. If, for some reason, you don't trust free software, then you may want to consider competing commercial software, such as Corel WordPerfect Office [Amazon.ca/Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com], Lotus SmartSuite [Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com], or Sun StarOffice [Amazon.ca/Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com].

For web browsing, many people recommend SeaMonkey, the Open Source web browser which has been developed from the codebase for Mozilla, or else FireFox, which has Mozilla's browser code without the E-mail client or HTML editor functions, and thus takes up less disk space and run faster. Another popular option is Opera.

For E-mail, there are several alternatives to Outlook, such as Thunderbird and Pegasus.

There are many, many Bible software packages available today. Two which are free, popular, and have a number of translations available are e-Sword and the Online Bible. For other Christian software, please consult the Church Related Software Index, and for other free software, please see the Software page of the Computer Re-use Optimisation Project.

Security

For security, you need to protect yourself against four distinct threats: viruses, spyware, rootkits, and system intrusions by worms and hackers. To protect yourself against viruses, I always recommend F-PROT, which is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and even DOS. (The signature files for all of them are the same, so whichever version you run, you will be able to detect and disinfect viruses which are aimed at any of those platforms.) Registered charities qualify for the educational discount. My brother the virus guru also recommends AVG Anti-Virus [Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com], Kaspersky Anti-Virus [Amazon.ca/Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com], NOD32, and Sophos, which is also available for multiple platforms (Linux, Netware, UNIX, and Windows, among others.)

There are a number of antispyware packages available, but according to the experts, none of them are 100% effective. However, by deploying multiple tools, such as Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and SpyWareBlaster, you can get pretty good coverage. For details on spyware and comparative reviews of antispyware software, the Spyware Warrior site is a good place to start.

To root out rootkits, again, you might want to use several packages, just to make sure. Two possibilities are Aries and AVG Antirookit. For details on rootkits and a list of available antirootkit software, Antirootkit.com is a good place to start.

For keeping out worms and hackers, you need a good firewall. The best is a hardware firewall appliance, such as the Linksys EtherFast Firewall Router [Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com], or better yet, something from Fortinet or NetSentron. Alternatively, you can build your own firewall appliance with a dedicated PC running firewall software such as IPcop, Smoothwall, or NetSentron. Many people, for whatever reasons, prefer to use a software firewall. This is definitely a second best option, but is at least better than running your system unprotected. I don't recommend either Norton or Microsoft for this. Because there is a free version available, ZoneAlarm is very popular. However, simply because it is so popular, I would suggest that you also consider another software firewall, such as Comodo Firewall Pro, PC Tools Firewall Plus, or Sunbelt Personal Firewall, all of which are free or have free versions for personal or home use. (I have nothing against ZoneAlarm. By all accounts, it's a perfectly good firewall. However, as I said before, I'm all for technological diversity. If somebody does crack it, then you'd still be safe if you were using something less popular.)

Note: No security package can protect you if you don't take elementary steps to protect yourself. If you're using Windows, you need to run Windows Update every month, preferably fairly soon after "patch Tuesday" (the second Tuesday of each month), when Microsoft traditionally releases bug fixes and security patches to their software. Whatever operating system you use, you should check for patches and updates monthly, and do the same for all of your applications.

For general disk housekeeping, consider Norton SystemWorks [Amazon.ca/Amazon.co.uk/Amazon.com], which includes Norton Disk Doctor and other utilities in one handy package. However, even though the package includes Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security, I don't recommend installing those modules. Neither counts among the more capable packages in their fields, and Norton Antivirus is known to conflict with Ad-Aware, which is one of the better antispyware packages. For file compression, the most popular utility is WinZip. However, most people tend to "pirate it", that is, using it without registering it. Then, too, lately WinZip has taken to bundling third party products together with WinZip, some of which have been accused of being spyware. If you are prepared to register your software, you might want to consider getting PKZIP instead. After all, PKWARE developed the ZIP compression standard in the first place. (I should note that WinZip's encryption system is different from PKZIP's, so if you are exchanging encrypted ZIP files with other users, you should agree on which standard to use.) PZKIP is available for DOS, OS/2, and Windows. If you prefer not to pay anything, or if you want a wider choice of operating systems, then you might want to consider Info-Zip, which is open source and comes in a variety of flavours. You might also want to consider Allume's StuffIt Deluxe, which was originally developed for the Mac, but is now available for Linux and WIndows as well.

Cheaper Alternatives

If you can't afford a new PC, even a no-name clone, you need do without. One alternative is to by used. (In fact, I have never actually owned a new PC in my life. I have always used "hand-me-downs", and if they're not shiny and hot and envy-inducing, at least they have always done what I needed them to do.) In fact, I have had the experience of having working hardware that I can't get rid of, because people, even people who are asking for a computer to be given to them, still want to have the newest generation of chips and the latest version of Windows. However, as I argue in the Computer Re-use Optimisation Project, older hardware can be perfectly useful, and there is a fair amount of software available (some of it free) which will work on older hardware. Therefore, as long as you are buying from a reliable source, you can get a slightly less capable PC for less than a new one, and still have a reasonable expectation that your purchase will keep working reliably for some years.

I can't comment on the system requirements for Linux or any other operating system, because there are simply too many variables to deal with in this space. I recommend consulting the system requirements for the operating system or distribution you want to use, and then doubling the minimum RAM requirement. However, based on my experience with Windows, here are the minimum specifications that I would recommend for each version:

I wouldn't even attempt to run Windows 2000 on anything less than a Pentium II with at least 256 MB of RAM, running at at least 300 MHz. Because of security issues, I do not recommend running a computer with an older version than Windows 2000 connected directly to the Internet. Older PCs should be connected through a dedicated firewall.
Generally speaking, I would recommend at least a Pentium I with 64 MB of RAM and a 1 GB hard drive for running Windows 95 or 98, and 128 MB of RAM for Windows NT 4.0, but that makes for painfully slow performance. Double the RAM if you don't want to spend all your time waiting for the computer, and at least double the hard drive if you want to have any space for your files. (I don't recommend running Windows Me under any circumstances.)
Strictly speaking, you can run Windows 95 on a 486, if you give it enough RAM and disk space. (I actually managed to get Windows 95, Mozilla, and StarOffice 5.2 running on a 486 with a 425 MB hard drive, but that's not an exercise that I would recommend to anyone unless you actually like the challenge of weeding out extraneous files.) If you're considering using a 386 or 486 (or, for that matter, even a Pentium I), Breadbox Computer Company LLC offers Breadbox Ensemble, derived from GeoWorks, which runs extremely well on older hardware. (In fact, versions 1.0 and 1.2 of GeoWorks ran on an XT, which isn't something you could say for Windows.) Also, Caldera (now Lineo) has made Caldera DR-DOS 7.03 available for free, and even open source. You can find it, among other places, at Club DR-DOS.
Only PCs with a 80386 or better processor can use virtual memory, so unless you are setting up a computer museum, I would not recommend attempting to set up a 80286 or earlier. (Actually, since most people consider even a Pentium to be "junk", and tend to give them away, rather than attempt to sell them, you should have no financial motivation to look at anything older. But just in case you are particularly hard up, I would make a 386 the very lower limit you should consider putting any effort into.)

Links

Here are some other sites you may want to check out:

	AR Miller's Windows 98 Web Sites have a large collection of tips and links related to Windows 98.
	AR Miller's Windows 2000 Setup has a large collection of tips and links related to Windows 2000.
	HardwareCentral offers tips, driver links, and "How-To" tutorials on PC hardware.
	Low End PC offers news and information about PCs which are not at the leading edge of technology.
	Tom's Hardware Guide is another huge PC hardware resource site, with reviews, tips, and resources.

Note: Due to restrictions imposed by the publishers and manufacturers, Amazon.ca can only ship some computer-related products within Canada, Amazon.com can only ship those products to the USA, and Amazon.co.uk can only ship to the European Union and some other countries in Europe.