Reviews (1)

The pristine headache
This is my very first computer, bought with my own money, earned from my own sweat and toil. Perhaps then, I am biased when I say that it is definately an excellent and capable little machine for a very reasonable price. HOWEVER, it would have been nice if the motherboard hadn't died after only three weeks. Luckily there is a warrenty and if you can manage to get the computer ownership transferred to your name (if it is a refurbished computer like mine, the company who sells it to you is sypposed to do this) before anything goes wrong, then you might just be able to get it fixed. I'm going through all this as I write. As always, buyer beware. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Grab It While You Can
I have this same computer. I have had it for over 5 years. I bought it refurbished then for over a thousand with the same features and CPU. I have never had to replace a part on it. It has been hauled, rained on, dropped, ate up with viruses and nothing ever failed. I still have it and it works like new even now. You can't go wrong with this deal for internet or personal computing.

Prime Tech
The desktop metaphor was a brilliant
innovation-30 years ago. Now it's an
unmanageable mess, and the search is on for a
better way to handle information.

"The desktop is dead," declares David Gelernter.
Gelernter is referring to the "desktop metaphor"-the
term frequently used for the hierarchical system of
files, folders and icons that we use to manage
information stored on our home or office computers.
At the annual gathering of technophiles at
TechXNY/PC Expo 2001 in New York last June, he
told the rapt crowd attending his keynote speech
that the desktop metaphor is nothing more than
virtual Tupperware. "Our electronic documents are
scattered by the thousands in all sorts of little
containers all over the place," he said. "The more
information and the more computers in our lives, the
more of a nuisance this system becomes."

For the past decade or so Gelernter has been
campaigning for a new metaphor to overthrow the
desktop-first in research he carried out at Yale
University, where he is a professor of computer
science, and now as chief scientist of his new
company, Mirror Worlds Technologies, with offices
in New Haven, CT, and New York City. In March,
Mirror Worlds announced a novel metaphor called
Scopeware, software that automatically arranges
your computer files in chronological order and
displays them on your monitor with the most recent
files featured prominently in the foreground. Scopeware is far more sweeping than a
simple rearrangement of icons, however: in effect, it transfers the role of file clerk
from you to the computer, seamlessly ordering documents of all sorts into
convenient, time-stamped files.

If you have ever forgotten what you named a file or which folder you put it in, you
probably will agree that it's time for a change. The desktop metaphor is decades
old, arising from early-1970s work at Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center, and
was never intended to address today's computing needs. Indeed, the product that
brought the metaphor to mass-market attention was Apple Computer's 1984
Macintosh; it had no built-in hard drive, and its floppy disks each stored only 400
kilobytes of information. Today we're using the same metaphor to manage the
countless files on our ever more capacious hard drives, as well as to access the
virtually limitless information on the Web. The result? Big, messy hierarchies of
folders. Favorites lists where you never find anything again. Pull-down menus too
long to make sense of. ... Read more