Category Archives: Computers

New Computer in Phases

Posted by santosj on January 12, 2007 1 comments

I was quoting myself on how much it would cost to buy the parts to get a computer up and running. It did come out more than what I currently can spend. The reason is that I want to buy all of the parts to get it running and that has to include the motherboard, the CPU, and the RAM. It would also have to include the Video Card, since I don’t have a PCI Express card, but it has the video built in. At least for now, I don’t need to buy a video card.

For now, this machine will be a replacement for my old one, but I am going to build it up to be my DVR replacement later. Well, the technical term will be Media Server, since I’m going to hook it up to the network at a later point.

Phase 1

  1. Media Center Set Top box – $115
  2. 550W Modular Power Supply – $106

I’ve decided to buy them both at the same time since I’ll need the new power supply for the new motherboard. It is better to get those two at the same time in case the power supply is what burned the motherboard out.

Completed!

Phase 2

  1. ASUS M2NPV-VM – $91.99
  2. AMD Sempron Processor 2800+ Socket AM2 – $49.00
  3. Corsair VS1GB667D2 1GB – $99.90

Completed!

Phase 3

For the third phase I want to get any misc products that I’ll need. I’m actually thinking about buying multiple DVD/CD Burner Drives, for backup and so that I can load up the movies and watch them. It would be kind of cool replacing my current DVD drive, but it would be kind of difficult replacing it with something that has RBG video connections. I will eventually need to find a PCI or PCI-E card that has those connections to fully make it a true Media Center worth replacing the DVD and DVR.

  1. GeIL GX21GB5300X 1GB DDR2-667
  2. All In Wonder
  3. Hard Drives (5 total)
  4. DVD/CD Burner
  5. DVD/CD Drives (x2)
  6. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, if cheap enough

I only have 3 external drive supported, so one will of course be a DVD/CD burner, but I will also look for a HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Drives as an alternative, as to be ready for the next generation. I haven’t seen prices on it yet, but the burner for Blu-Ray is about $500, so the actual player would be more around $200-$300. I am also planning on buying a LCD HD TV later on, so the Media Center will have to have connectors for interfacing with that also.

I might also split this up in a few more phases until it is completely built and replaces my current machine. The hard drives might as well be their own phase.

I’m planning on buying SATA 3Gb drives between 250GB-500GB. I’m planning on a RAID 5 setup, so I’ll need to get at least 3, I don’t see the need for RAID 0+1 as really the Videos won’t be that important. If I get the 500GB drives, then I will do the RAID 0+1, but anything less will get RAID 5. I hope to have the total of 1TB of space for videos, music, and photos to be networked for all of the computers. This phase has been in the works for a long time, so I don’t know if I’m actually going to do it or not. The problems I have are with hard drives failing after a year or two. It would suck to buy a 500GB drive every year or so. Thankfully, the prices do fall every year. They are also coming out with a one TB drive. I also would like to buy one of those 128 GB Flash Drives as it would be super cool as a swap drive.

Goal

Is to completely replace both of my current computers with newer ones within the next year. I also would like to build a gaming PC as a third machine. So, technically, I would have one low range, one mid range, and one high range when I’m completed. As well as a 22″ LCD Monitor.

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Cleaning Room leads to Computer Failure

Posted by santosj on January 2, 2007 4 comments

Well, it finally happened, I cleaned my room! Yeah! I still have a stack of papers that I need to go through and sort or trash, but I can do that in another 6 months when I gain the motivation to do so.

The side effect was that my computer failed massively. It appears that I’ll have to put off buying that massive LCD monitor until I can get a damn computer that runs XP smoothly and quickly. Right now I’m working on a old computer (6 years 1.2 GHz, yes, the madness), that can’t even run Firefox smoothly. It could also do with the 133 MHz (before DDR) 528MB RAM, but I also think it might be the processor.

My solution, but a really cheap recent generation computer in the next couple of months and then buy the LCD, then work on building a better and faster second computer. I’m just going to donate my current computer parts (including the monitor when I finally buy the LCD). I thought of using it for a web server, but unless I load Linux on it (which I would), it probably wouldn’t help much.

I also plan on downloading and burning SuSe 10.2 so I can try that out instead of XP. Burning the ISO might be difficult until I can find the drivers.

The also other issues is that I now have install everything, including games. Hopefully, my other hard drive (I bought another one) is still functional, so I can get the rest of my stuff.

Oh yeah, some good news is that I found a 1GB flash memory stick for 39 USD. I remember when 128 MB cost me $100, so I will get it before school starts. It will be hard to pass that deal up when I can store all of my projects as well as assignments on a single stick.

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I want 22″ LCD Monitor

Posted by santosj on December 24, 2006 1 comments

I was thinking about buying a 19″ LCD monitor, but after some thinking, I figured I should spend a little bit more. Not so much for the games as for the programming and surfing. I was thinking about it for some time. I think I can justify the price, an extra 200 USD, because it will be a one time and four year (or more) investment.

It would be neat to have a monitor bigger than my current tv right now. When Vista comes out, I would like to use the Sidebar without taking up too much monitor space.

The price, a whopping, heart splitting 400 USD! Sure, it is 200 USD more than another monitor (19″) that I had my sights on. However, after Christmas and sometime in January after I finish paying off my bills, I should have the money to pay for it. It will put off my building a new computer, however if I don’t get these PC components before I start building, then it will be another few years before I would feel like paying the expense for it.

The next purchase will be for a 3-in-1 printer-scanner-fax, a laser color printer, and a 8MP digital camera. I’m still planning on having my computer by the summer, however in the past I have focused too much on the computer and not on other components. Spending a lot of the computer kinds of means nothing when it becomes difficult to do or use other things. My printer is currently not working, but I can get a 3-in-1 for less than 100 USD, so my wish list will eventually go down.

*Update* I expect to have the money in about two weeks. I’m going to pay it using my credit cards and I need to pay them off first. It will take another two weeks to pay one off, which is the one I’m going to use and the other one should only take a single paycheck, so in another month. So in two weeks, I’ll have a really big ass monitor.

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When Upgrading My Computers

Posted by santosj on November 27, 2006 2 comments

The time will come soon, when I’ll finally have two functional working PCs. After I do that, then I think I’ll either save up for a Laptop or start building a Gaming PC.

I’m contemplating whether or not I should just replace both with cheap current low end hardware instead of buying new hardware for old computers. It depends on whether or not I want to spend the money. Really, I have no idea what I would do with them. Isn’t like I can sell them. I really don’t want to be left with parts that don’t go anywhere. Really, the only reason I’m still holding on to them is because I’ll rather not recycle them. The PCs only need a few parts, if they break down in the next few years, then I’ll think about retiring them.

One PC is going to pretty much need a complete overhaul and will be basically a new PC after it is all done. I’m looking at about 400 to 500 on parts. I can use some parts from the one I overhaul on my other and save a little money. I was thinking about whether I should use Dual core, even if it will be about $100 more. It will become a Media/File Server, so it might just be a good idea in the long term.

Windows Vista is coming out and I need to contemplate buying it and saving up for that. I’m also thinking about the current generation of Linux OS and I think I can probably buy Windows Vista ultimate (retail) for the gaming machine and install Linux on the rest of the systems. It would probably be nice to have a third machine to install whatever to test its stability before installing on my other machines. Also, for the gaming machine, it would be better if there weren’t a whole lot of processes running in the background, even if it will be Dual-Core. I want to have as much processing power going to the game as possible.

I don’t know how many processes Windows Vista comes after install, but I can hopefully shutdown any services I’m not going to use.

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Truth About Serial ATA and PCI-E

Posted by santosj on July 31, 2006 3 comments

*Updated* I had my math wrong and I’m correcting and taking back what I originally said.

The issue came up the other day, while I was reading the newspaper for an advertisement for SATA Hard Drive. It stated that since it ran at 150 MB/s that it was faster than ATA 133, which has speeds of you guessed it, 133 MB/s. The first impressions would that it wasn’t accurate, but it actually is.

The Math

Serial transfer uses 10 bits, instead of the parallel 8 bits. It uses a start and stop bit for error checking and handling.

The actual speed of SATA 1 is 1.5 Gb/s divided by 10 is 150 MB/s.

Correction:
The 20% should be taken from the 1500MB and not the 150 MB.

1500 – (1500*.2) = 1200Mb
1200 / 8 = 150 MB

The formula would then be:

MaxMb – (MaxMb*.2) = ActualMb
ActualMb / 8 = ActualMB

Or just:

MaxMb / 10 = ActualMB

Which is why I came up with my crazy ass conspiracy theory. It seems that in my arrogance, I didn’t see that the 10 was including the overhead and therefore the actual speeds should be lower. I must of came across the first formula earlier in my research but needing an easier way decided the second was faster. Using the second formula I forgot that it was including the overhead, and decided to take out the 20% in that. Goes to prove that the larger formulas are better for somewhat confused individuals.

Serial ATA Benefits

The added benefits of Serial ATA outweigh the overhead. The max speed for PATA is probably 200 MB/s and that is really pushing it. PATA also has the 18 inches length limit, you can run SATA up to a meter or more. SATA only allows for one connector, but since it simplifies the board circuits, you can have as many as the bus will allow. I’m already seeing boards with 4 to 6 SATA connectors.

Phasing Out PATA

As soon as DVD, CD-ROM, and other drives start using the SATA connector, it will eventually mean the end of the PATA life. PATA will still be around for another 3 to 4 years, but like PCI Express replacing AGP, you will eventually find motherboards without PATA or with only 1 primary slot. The major problem with not having a PATA slot is that Windows XP has problems unless it finds and can install on the PATA drive. The problem may deal more with the special drivers and not with Windows XP, but the conflict should eventually be solved.

Floppy drives are no longer mandatory and if you really need to, you can write MS-DOS to a CD-ROM and have all of your disk utilities on there. It is what I have and it isn’t all that hard to do, all you need is Nero and the core DOS files.

What I would like is to buy a motherboard without the Floppy slot or PATA slots, devoting the entire board to SATA. You would be able to make the board a great deal smaller if you remove both the Floppy and PATA slots. You could probably do a micro ATA down to just a little bit larger than a Gamecube with the RAM slots, CPU and PCI-E slots taking up most of the space.

Total Serial ATA Speeds

SATA 1: 150 MB/s (Megabyte per second)
SATA 2: 300 MB/s
SATA 3: 600 MB/s

Total PCI Express Speeds

These speeds are bi-directional, meaning that are the same going both ways and not shared. However, for most applications, you will be sending more information to the card then it is going to send back to the CPU.

PCI-E x1: 250 MB/s
PCI-E x4: 1000 MB/s
PCI-E x8: 2 GB/s
PCI-E x16: 4 GB/s (Used for Graphic Layer also)
PCI-E x32: 8 GB/s

They are talking about in the future, changing the speeds from 2.5 Gb/s to 5 Gb/s and then to 10 Gb/s. A look at what that would be is totally crazy.

5 Gb/s
PCI-E x1: 500 MB/s
PCI-E x16: 8 GB/s
PCI-E x32: 16 GB/s

10 Gb/s
PCI-E x1: 1 GB/s
PCI-E x16: 16 GB/s
PCI-E x32: 32 GB/s

We are looking at 10+ years of time before PCI-E goes over to 10Gb/s in my opinion. It is crazy now to think that it is needed, except for gaming. Even gaming GPU doesn’t even use all of the available bandwidth on the current 4GB it has. It would be nice to have 8 GB, but that is actually like 16GB total going both ways. The Serial ATA and PCI-Express makes available far more speed than IDE and PCI, which would probably require 128 lanes making boards even larger and more complex.

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Hello. I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC

Posted by santosj on July 20, 2006 Comments Off

These ads are factual in their information and provide some entertainment. However, some information is left out. This is not a post about how much I hate Macs. I do not hate Macs, but I do not support half-truths either.

I have always looked upon the Macintosh as great hardware, but crappy as hell OS before Mac OS 10. Mac OS 9 and below were just horrible in the way it functioned and looked. Just add the damn second mouse button, it was like they invented the damn mouse anyway.

The only thing keeping me from it now is the price. Well, that the price of everything else for the Mac. You have to buy everything for the Mac and that takes a large chunk out of what you can afford on a poor man’s budget.

PC Entertainment

The ads made reference to the fact that Macs are generally used for creating art and animation. PCs are generally used for office, such as word processing, spreadsheets, and coding. The ad made reference to this.

Macs, have very small PC game base outside of the Windows OS for Macintosh, which will support those games. The Mac OS 10.x doesn’t support a lot of games is the fact. The Windows OS supports over a 1000 games for entertainment and is the main reason why it is so popular.

Viruses

Some would say that Windows has such a huge virus base is because it is so popular and virus coders want to effect as many people as possible. There are viruses for the Mac and even Unix/Linux. The truth is that Windows has so many venerabilities in the kernel, Internet Explorer, and other Microsoft Products that is easy to create viruses for the OS.

The Mac, once it gains a larger market share will be met with a greater wave of viruses.

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Cheapest Computer System

Posted by santosj on May 13, 2006 Comments Off

To really get a cheap computer you need to build with the smallest and integrated components. With that in mind, I decided to go for the Micro ATX case and motherboard style since I’m not going to be adding that many addition drives anyway. It will be very limiting, but will fit into my budget and my style.

Case: $43.99 $41.10
Motherboard: $56.06 $67.72
Processor: $52.66 $49.99
RAM: (1 1GB 333MHz) $88.98 $103.99
Power Supply: $38.00 $39.98
Hard Drive: $58.23 $57.17
DVD-ROM: $30.94 $29.94
Case Fans: $9.68 $9.32 (x2)
CPU Fan: $36.99 $39.99

The Motherboard

The motherboard is good for a few reasons.

  1. Supports onboard video, which doesn’t force me to buy a video card just to run the computer.
  2. Includes onboard LAN, so I don’t have to buy a NIC just to connect to the network. It also frees up a PCI slot.
  3. Includes onboard sound, so I also don’t have to buy a sound card just to listen to sound.

There are a total of two free PCI slots out of the 3 available, which allows me to upgrade later if I choose. Lets say if I want to turn the computer into a TV, I can do so by buying the PCI components to output the display to the tv. It also includes a total of 4 Serial ATA slots, just in case I want to turn one of the Machines into a DVR or Network storage. I do wish it didn’t include the floppy and left out one of the PATA slots because I’m not going to be using them anyway.

Also includes a PCI-Express slot in case I want to play games on the machine later. Which would keep the computer from becoming too obsolete. The only issue is that it only supports AMD pin 754 which is going to have a short life span, so the issue of upgrading the CPU will become a factor several years down the line. However, if at the time there is a cheaper 939 pin motherboard with the same specs, then I’ll go for that one instead.

The Power Supply

The power supply must have serial ATA power connectors, this is a must. I don’t want to have to buy adapters down the line just to connect the devices. The Thermaltake power supply is cheap, silent, and while it only supports two serial ata connects, it has enough regular connects to buy the adapters if I ever get more than two SATA hard drives, which is unlikely.

It is also 430W which should be enough to power a single DVD-ROM drive along with the maximum of three hard drives.

The Memory

I found that it was the same price to get two 512MB 333MHz sticks or to get one 1GB 333MHz stick. If I get the 1GB stick, then I’ll be paying more, but I will be able to upgrade easier to 2GB later if I ever need the extra RAM, which I will when Windows Vista comes out.

Hard Drive

For the base systems, an 80 GB hard drive is big enough for Windows for two partitions one ~60GB and the other ~18GB. The first for Windows and applications and the second for My Documents and system cache. If the Windows Partition ever fails, then the My Documents will still exist. However, if the hard drive fails then my documents would be lost. I do want to have a file server for keeping a backup of the documents.

Replaces

I have a PC that I’m not longer using for anything and only needs a video card to work. I want to get rid of it after I get the other computers. However it is going to need a graphics card.

Computer 1:

Computer 2:

This computer is Pentium 4 based at 2.4 GHz and it is failing. I will most likely use the existing transferable components over to the other systems. Such as the hard drives, DVD-RW, CD-ROM, and fans. Everything else would be recycled. It is well past its lifecycle anyway.

However replacing it will give me a less powerful computer, but won’t be needed when I build my gaming machine.

The cost will still however be somewhat high.

Case: Same As Above
Motherboard: Same As Above
Processor: Same As Above
Power Supply: Same As Above
CPU Fan: $39.93 $36.99

Total to Upgrade: $252.39

I’ll upgrade the cheap one first since it would only cost less than 25 dollars to get it working. Since to upgrade the second one would be cheaper than building a new one, I will just upgrade the second one as a new project. I’ll build a third and then try to build the game machine after. In all, I should have four PCs.

Buy Together But Not All

Some parts need to be bought together to keep compatibility between the parts. Also, the time between purchases may allow the other parts to decrease in price.

Step 1:

  • Case
  • Power Supply
  • Case Fans
  • Total: $102.20

Step 2:

  • Hard Drive
  • DVD-ROM
  • Total: $92.06

Step 3:

  • Motherboard
  • CPU
  • RAM
  • CPU Fan
  • Total: $260.04

Conclusion

Some parts have cheaper prices, but you have to decide on which components you want to last and give you the least problems down the road. If I buy a cheap fan, it is likely to fail sooner than I would anticipate. I can spend more and still be within my budget by taking a chunk of the price from the case, motherboard, and CPU which don’t need to be over powered depending on what I’m going to use them for.

The point is that you have to spend more on RAM and hard drives while you can’t cut back on other parts depending on your needs. If I was building a game machine, I would go for higher CPU and mother board and include a GPU card. However, I still won’t need to spend too much on hard drives and would only probably use one hard drive for the life of the system.

Total: $454.30

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Computer System Failure

Posted by santosj on April 21, 2006 Comments Off

My main computer is corrupting my hard drives causing me to spend more money than I should replacing them and wasting time retrieving the information that was on it. Not that the information all that mattered anyway. I believe I may have lost a game that I paid for, not that I’m playing the game anymore.

I figure that if I’m going to replace the power supply, then I should replace the motherboard. If I’m replacing the motherboard then I should replace the CPU. The rest of the components I am going to keep, except for the Graphics card, I’m going to have to replace that card if I’m going to replace the motherboard.

It is not all bad, since I’ll be able to use the graphics card that I have now on my other system and have two fully running systems instead of just one. And I’ll be able to follow my plan of having one as just a general web computer, one as a tv that is networked for others to view as well, and a third one that will be a full game machine with the latest technology.

I currently don’t have the money right now, so either I have to save up a little bit more and pay it off little by little. My budget on each of the components needs has to be lower than 100 dollars, which shouldn’t be hard. I’ll probably get the power supply first, because it will have serial ATA power cables.

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Tables, a Love Hate Relationship

Posted by santosj on April 13, 2006 Comments Off

Years and years ago when I was just starting learning HTML I never use tables because they were “hard.” Well, I was working with HTML for about two years and never really grokked tables until I started building a fan site for GundamW. The point is that after I did start working with the tables, I began to love them. All of the content wrapped to the width of the window automatically. At that time it was awesome because I was used to using br tags to break content. I didn’t have to use as many, which was a huge time saver. Good times.

Then I found CSS and I found a new mistress, but I’m still married to tables. While support for tables is the same in all browsers, the same is not true for CSS and support for advanced techniques, such as not using tables at all. Having tried to do this a few times, I have found that while you can remove 90% of table uses in Mozilla/Firefox, you can only remove 70% of table uses in IE (not tested, estimated guess). Meaning that you have to use hacks for the same to work on IE. I have also had other issues with IE’s positioning and width, which they may have fixed in IE 7.

Why the Hate?

Using tables in tables increases the chances of error from not closing the inner tables causing the layout to mess up. Which is a problem that I had in another site I was developing. In my editing I had remove what I thought were duplicated table tags, but I was wrong. I was able to fix it by starting over and recreating the main tables.

Using tables in tables also causes some slow down in the loading from the browser or that is what I have read. The more complex the design, the more calculations that need to be done. It also makes changing the design a little bit difficult after a few months because you don’t remember what you did to create the design (unless you leave yourself html comments).

I don’t know, I suppose I just like doing the newest and greatest thing to enhance my skills. Learning can be fun, if not a little time consuming. Doing projects is the only time I have to learn something new. It does add to the development time, but whether or not I succeed still brings knowledge for later when I do need to solve a problem. A lot of the projects that I worked on and failed, I can do easily with no difficultly and few errors. I have an understanding of my limitations from then and now, so that I can work on achieving the next level.

That and I hate the fact that it takes a lot more space or lines to create the tables and cells. With CSS, I can use a multiple DIV or SPAN tags to create the same look and save space.

CSS 3

CSS 3 is going to have added support to rid the web development community of tables. Mozilla has some support for it, but it will be years before the major browsers support all of it. Just look at IE, finally, after years and years they are catching up to Firefox and Safari. Firefox still has to play catch up with a few other features that would be nice to have, at least it has support for SVG and XML extended features.

Layout Without Tables

Once support for CSS 3 does come, then I suppose tables will become a taboo such as using frames. Using tables has its purpose as does frames, it is just that people over use them and it reflects poorly.

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Used to design for IE…

Posted by santosj on April 6, 2006 Comments Off

But now I test my pages for Firefox. It was strange, I would design and test my pages in IE and then just forget about the tiny 1 to 3 percent that used ‘other’ browsers. That changed however when I wanted to use more advanced layouts with CSS and JavaScript. Mozilla had some really cool JavaScript DOM methods that IE didn’t have so using JavaScript was easier to work with the layout.

However the nagging pesence of IE hung over the development process because I would risk lossing out 95% of my viewers. Compared to only 3% with the other category. When no one visits your web site except yourself, then the choice is easy, but I DID want people to see my web sites who used other browsers besides Mozilla.

Loved IE

I used to look at Netscape with scorn since IE had so much more features and support for HTML. There were a couple of sites that stated that unless the page rendered correcly in Netscape 4.7 then they won’t list your site. I thought they were Web Nazis, trying to force people to use an outdated browser (this was many many years ago when IE just started to win the wars).

Many people however now don’t tell you that, because Netscape 4.7 is far behind IE 6.0 and is now dead (Long live Mozilla). Having to be forced into the new browser Mafia known as IE, I’ll say I have since switched back to Netscape after having been a long fan of IE and a really short fan of Netscape. The issue has long been that they haven’t updated browser support for newer web standards for years, forcing web designers and developers to work with the lowest common denominator.

No one is going to tell a group of 80% plus that they can’t go to their business site and buy their products. They would lose to much money. The other issue I have is that some web sites force you to use IE because they don’t check for the supported methods and only do browser checking. Such an outdated technique, it is sad that I even am force to use IE when I don’t want to. The same could be said about me wanting to force IE users to use Firefox.

Loved Firefox

Firefox when it first came out was stable, it was great. With version 1.5, it is starting to piss me off. With the popups that still show up rarely and it crashing after being open for more than several weeks. Not to mention that it is a major hog of RAM resources. While you can open each page in a tab in the same window, each page allocates far more resources then I suspect IE would ever do for the same amount of pages open (I however did not and am not going to test this).

Firefox 2.0 better kick some major ass and stablize enough so that I can keep it running forever, like I could with version 1.0.x. As Firefox becomes an major player of users running Firefox, it is increasely becoming hit with hackers. That is not to say that it has more than IE, but still is pretty annoying.

Future of IE

IE has a stable future since it is part of the operating system and can be used to get Firefox or Opera (which I may start using instead). They have been updating the browser with newer security and CSS features. It is going in the right direction but still does not support XHTML out of the box. By the time they end up adding support XHTML 2.0 will be finalized and recommended. I would seriously love to use XHTML 2.0, CSS 3, and XFORMS, working with those would make my day.

Firefox is already on the road to including them, while IE is not. They still haven’t yet caught up with Firefox in terms of standards. The only other issue is even if Firefox or IE include them tomorrow not everyone is going to be running the newer versions.

Not everyone Upgrades

People are lazy about upgrading and some don’t upgrade for intelligent reasons. Some contend that with every new version they are released before every bug could be worked out or found out. By the time Firefox 1.0 was out it had been tested and stable for over a year. Firefox 1.5 had not had that amount of time testing and it really shows. Does that mean however that they should allow each version to go through the same process? Hell no, it would take forever for anything to come out. We would still be wait for Firefox 1.5 until next year, but at least it wouldn’t of had all of the memory leaks and be as stable as Firefox 1.0.

There are still a small amount of people out there with Windows 98 (how sad) and won’t upgrade for a very long time. They are also probably wondering why their computer is so damn slow and why a bunch of popups are showing porn. Sometimes it costs a lot of money to upgrade, which they don’t have. Microsoft released XP Home to try to get at those customers, but they seemed to have failed. Vista will include 8 different products aimed at Europe and different home and business customers. I hope that at least the majority of people upgrade to the lowest package, if it is cheap enough and I believe that it will be.

Enough about Windows, I still have people visiting my site with IE 5.0 and IE 5.5, which I don’t and won’t support. The issue they have is that they hear all the time about the Security flaws of IE 6.0 and the bugs. With as much time as IE 6.0 has been out and as many bugs they have fixed, I believe it is time to finally upgrade with at least SP2.

As for Firefox 1.0 users, they probably won’t upgrade for a long time to Firefox 2.0, until they precieve it to be stable. I hope they continue to work on the memory leakage and stablity of Firefox 1.5 so that users will at least upgrade to that version.

When IE 7.0 is released, I doubt most of the people are going to jump on the bandwagon and download it. If they buy Vista and upgrade, then yeah, those people are going to have to use it (which is a good thing), but eventually, IE 8 is going to be released with XHTML, SVG, and CSS 3 (cross your fingers) support and then we’ll have to play the waiting game to see how many people pull straws and upgrade.

Conclusion

For now, I will continue to devote time to maintaining limited support for IE 6.0. If I ever work for a company that maintains that the web site must work with all Browsers, then I have the skills and the time to achieve that also. Really, it is only the time restriction that keeps me from doing just that. I don’t like creating two or more pages for the different browsers, that is why web standards exist… damn it. Even when IE 7.0 is released, I’ll still have to support IE 6.x. But at least if the person has IE 7, then I can make an allowance to fully support them as I would for Firefox.

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