Case in point: in college, I purchased much of my clothing from Old Navy, as it was inexpensive but of decent quality. After a while, particularly due to the trend of shirts becoming longer and more tunic-like, I had to stop shopping there, as I am a short girl (barely reaching 5’3″). However, in August, Old Navy announced that they would be offering Petite clothing on their website only, thus allowing me to stop having to spend money at pricier chains such as Ann Taylor Loft or Talbot’s to get shirts that fit me properly. Like Old Navy’s plus-sized line, the petite clothing is not available in their stores, so going to their brick and mortar location would still be fairly useless to me (although they do keep pants with shorter length inseams in the store). So, in utilizing internet-based distribution, the company is able to offer a greater variety in product with less overhead, driving up sales while keeping costs down, all due to a web-based sales component.

Additionally, as was mentioned in our class notes for this week, the internet has allowed smaller, independent businesses to flourish (although some of their business have no doubt lessened recently due to the downturn in the U.S. economy). In niche markets, this is a great benefit, allowing for a lot more selection and competition in pricing. A good example of this is Etsy, a kind of “Ebay for crafters”. Etsy works on set prices, rather than serving as an internet auction house, but it does the same thing that Ebay (originally, although this is now debatable given their new and more stringent auction rules) does– allows independent crafters or sellers to reach a much wider audience.

Until recently, we were using Comcast for internet connectivity. However, as fiber-optic cables were recently put down in our neighborhood, we have switched to Verizon FiOS. We switched for a couple reasons: firstly, Comcast’s customer service was pretty terrible, and secondly, the FiOS download and upload speeds are many times faster than Comcast’s. Our Comcast connection averaged about 6 mbps download and 1.5mbps upload, while FiOS could reach speeds of 19mbps downloading and 5mbps uploading, respectively. I highly recommend it so far.

To access the FiOS service, Verizon installs an optical network terminal on the exterior of the house and runs a coax cable to the router they supply. Most users would probably be fine with this router alone, but as we already had a complicated networking setup, my husband followed these instructions to bridge the coax to an ethernet port and a different router. We use this router, Linksys WRT54GL that is running Tomato, as our primary router and firewall, as Tomato is much more configurable firmware than the standard. With Tomato, we are also able to use OpenVPN to access our network when we are elsewhere. The router also implements Quality of Service (QoS) rules to allocate bandwidth according to usage– this prioritizes certain network activities over others.

My husband and I each have a laptop and a desktop, and in addition to that, the XBox360 and a headless Linux server are also connected in. The PCs, the server, and my husband’s laptop are connected directly to the router with cat5 cables, my laptop runs off wireless, and XBox runs off an additional router that acts as a wireless bridge. XBox’s wireless adapters are far more expensive than a Linksys router, so we decided to use that instead for reasons of pure frugality.

All of the computers run on Windows XP, although differing versions: two use Professional, one uses Home, and my laptop came with Media Center. The server is my husband’s pet project, and runs off Ubuntu, using Samba to integrate with Windows networking. It serves many functions: it acts as primary storage on the network(with a 1TB hard drive), an FTP server, a Ventrilo server (a voice chatting program for use primarily during online games), an XBox media server, allowing us to stream video to the XBox to watch on our TV, and as a Squid proxy, which cuts bandwidth usage during web browsing by caching oft-visited websites.

This all sounds terribly complicated, and it is, frankly, but it all works very well.

As more users adopted the new operating system, so came more reports of various bugs, security flaws, and other problems. To be fair, with the adoption of any new software there are likely to be some kinks to work out, but the swiftness with which Vista’s first service pack had to be released would indicate a lack of quality control on Microsoft’s part. With users running into problems with simple tasks such as deleting, copying and pasting, as reported here in the Register, an online IT magazine. To give some other examples, users had trouble uninstalling programs (as evidenced by the user in this thread on the Microsoft support forums), and users with Vista-equipped laptops found that their battery life was poor at best, as reported by ZDnet here. Reports generally professed a marked preference for Windows XP, to the point where a petition was organized imploring Microsoft to continue selling copies of XP well past their intended stop date. Companies such as Dell recognized this, and resumed offering XP on their prepackaged PCs and laptops.

Understandably, a launch wrought with all of these issues did not build consumer confidence, and Vista subsequently had a difficult time convincing users to adopt Vista as their new operating system. Microsoft quickly put out the first service pack for the software, which unfortunately was similarly wrought with issues, and locked many users out of their own computers. The Seattle PI’s Microsoft blog posted examples of Microsoft employees expressing their own dismay with the product’s lack of drivers and support. The software was even listed as number 10 in CNET’s Top Ten Terrible Tech Products of 2007.

A recent ad campaign has Jerry Seinfeld acting in a series of mostly irrelevant non-sequitor commercials for Vista, in an apparent attempt to distance themselves from the poor publicity they have received to this point. At this point in time, the company is known to be working on the next iteration of Windows, at the moment just dubbed Windows 7. Hopefully, like Windows ME in the late 90s, its successor will be a better, more stable, and more well received product.

David A. Karp has actually published a book on this topic, entitled Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks. This book not only details a number of specific complaints about the operating system, but also offers potential workarounds and solutions, and has generally favorable reviews. It is available here on Amazon.com.

I have not had much personal experience with Vista, outside of having used a friend’s Vista PC to look something up quickly over his house. As we will be switching to Vista in the near future when we receive new work PCs, I took the opportunity last fall to attend a one-session class on it, so that I would have at least some familiarity with it when the time comes. This session cemented my resolve not to pick up this operating system any time soon: after questioning the presenter on several topics, I was able to determine that my household’s current networking set up, as well as my desktop PC (one of its hard drives does not have a compatible RPM), would not be operable under Vista.

With this in mind, I am looking today at the most expensive and the least expensive PCs on TigerDirect.com. The least pricy new desktop computer on the site is the Systemax VIA Desktop PC. The $250 price tag for an 80GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM, and DVD/CD-Rom drive is not bad, particularly considering that it specifies that there is room in the case for later expansion. However, as this particular machine does not come with an operating system installed, most users (other than those inclined to Ubuntu or another free OS) will need to also purchase a copy of Windows XP (I specify this, instead of Windows Vista, as a machine with only 512MB of RAM is unlikely to be able to run Vista properly), which would add an extra $139 to the purchase price. This computer does have excellent reviews, so it must be very good at what it does. With those specifications, it may have some trouble playing back flash video from sites such as YouTube– my husband has an older PC with a comparable processor and amount of RAM, and it gets the stutters sometimes.

At the risk of sounding utterly brand-conscious, I personally would be unlikely to purchase a computer with a processor made by an company I have never heard anything about, at least not without doing significant research on their products. A cursory googling of the VIA C7-D processor seems generally lukewarm to favorable; the processor is certainly not the sleekest or fastest, but it is good on a utilitarian level and, to attract the more green-minded consumer, the brand is known for their environmentally conscious practices.

TigerDirect does also offer refurbished computers for an even lower price, most of which appear to be units that were leased to a company for a period of a year or two. While these are certainly not top-of-the-line model, they would be perfectly appropriate for a casual user.

The most expensive computer that they offer is the CybertronPC Armor ARMV2QX965BK Gaming PC, obviously packaged to appeal to the high-end gamer/LAN partier niche. This thing has not one, but three video cards, sixteen times the RAM of the computer discussed above, and an 3.00 GHz processor. The two RAID 0 hard drives are intended to boost speed for gameplay, but the measurable benefits of this have been debated. This kind of set-up is not really necessary for anyone but someone who either is just in love with having the newest, shiniest technology, someone who plays extremely processor (and video, and RAM…) intensive games, or someone who is heavy into video editing, probably on a professional level.

Fortunately, there are plenty of PC choices available on this site, and others, that fall in the middle ground. My computing supplies website of choice is NewEgg. My current desktop was built from scratch almost entirely of components purchased there, with the exception of a power supply that I picked up from CompUSA (before CompUSA closed down) and a few parts from the computer that preceded it. While building your own computer may not always be the cheapest option, it allows for customization to your specific needs.

This blog was created as part of an information systems course offered by University of Richmond’s school of continuing studies. Please feel free to look around, but bear in mind that all posts will only be pertinent to class material, and as such, might bore you to tears.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

– The Management