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“Tonsil” computing

By Marck Rimorin

“Tonsil” computing basically involves having a great PC which does nothing.

Lemme put it to you this way. Most home computing revolves around three programs: Microsoft Word, Winamp (or Windows Media Player) and Solitaire (or Hangaroo). These three programs fulfill your school/office needs and your entertainment needs. The most space you need here is some place to store your music files (mostly in the form of MP3, or for those who don’t know how or don’t have the software to extract an MP3 codec, WMA). Home computing is radically different from office computing: depending on your line of work you will definitely need more space for programs like AutoCAD and Adobe programs (Photoshop, PageMaker, InDesign, etc.) and space to store office files. The internet computer, on the other hand, is a tad more different than office computing, since you’ll need some space for your cache and network files. Gaming computers are even more different: these need some mean hardware to make the latest games work, along with near-perfect web connectivity, and huge hard disk space.

The “do-it-all” computer, on the other hand, is the combination of all of these types of computers put into one box. This PC is complete with all the trimmings: which include but are not limited to cold cathode, neon lighting, ant-farms, water-cooling systems, hamsters running around in plastic tubes around the case, flat-screen monitors… the list goes on. This is not necessarily a good thing: in the long run, you will have a computer that does it all, but ends up doing nothing.

A great PC is determined by its usability. The more a computer is used and maximized, the better it is. Specs are secondary, and miniature zoos and the disco-in-a-box aren’t priorities in buying and using PC’s. Mind you it isn’t all about how powerful your PC is, but how much power or hard drive space you actually use. Furthermore, PC’s are expensive to maintain: even maintenance-free Linux sometimes needs a vacuuming once in a while.

Depending on where you live and how much money you’re willing to spend, Internet access is not recommendable for the home PC. The most use most people would have for Internet revolves around three sites: Yahoo!, Google, and Friendster. Dial-up connections are overly slow. DSL and broadband connections, though they offer unlimited service for a fee, are impractical, especially if it’s a home PC and you don’t download a lot (that is, if you get bitten by the download bug). If you save images, text files, music files and videos on your home PC via the Internet, you might want to consider not keeping them on your hard drives, instead investing in a CD-writer if you want long-term storage via CD’s (CD’s can only last long if you take care of them, but they cannot last for a century as was claimed before). Solid-state memory is not yet cheap, but try investing on memory cards, memory sticks and flash cards if you go to internet shops a lot.

You can always have too much hard disk space: with a big hard drive comes that obsession to fill up every byte with all sorts of stuff, like images, poetry written in fancy fonts, wallpapers and all sorts of programs which you do not need. Eventually you eat up all the space and will need to either buy another hard drive or reformat your entire computer. Start by setting your PC priorities straight: even 200 GB of space in a top-of-the-line business hard drive is very limited. Have your hard disk partitioned with set space for documents, music and the obligatory computer abubot. Stick with this, and be very disciplined when you save files or eat up space on your disk.

Then there’s the question of sensibility: what is a sensible computer? Even a Pentium MMX running on Windows 95 is sufficient if all you do with your computer is to type papers with. Only hardcore gamers would find sense in Pentium 4 3 GHz computers with a couple of 120 GB hard drives, GeForce 4 MX video cards, 1 GB memory and 5.1 surround sound speakers (the hardcore gamer abhors the flat-screen monitor, and an overkill PC like this often comes with an old CRT monitor). What most people need is a computer which is just right for home computing needs, and is fast enough to play Hangaroo, right? For this a Pentium III with 8 GB of hard disk space, a decent video card, 128 MB of memory and a decent pair of generic speakers is more than adequate. Forget Windows XP with all its crashes: Windows 2000 will do (no, not Windows 98 or Windows ME). All the comforts of a good home computer can be fulfilled by these requirements, and then some.

So all in all, even a laos computer is sensible enough for home computing needs, and is inexpensive but not cheap. After all, a “do-it-all-and-then-some” computer will eventually end up gathering dust. #

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