On The Runway Like the fashion world's avant-garde clothing, new concept PCs using Intel's latest technologies offer a sneak peak at what's to come.

It's the holidays, the season when makers and resellers ofchips and PCs have visions of sugar plums and margin-savingshopping sprees dancing in their heads. This is the quarter thatmakes or breaks the year for many of them-and it's almostalways a good time to be shopping for a new PC, or maybe even 10 ofthem.

This year, your shopping trip is likely to be more satisfyingthan it's been in years past, thanks to several trends just nowcoming together. A softening U.S./world economy, especially inEurope, has hurt PC sellers' top lines, while higher energycosts and interest rates will jack up shipping and inventoryfinancing costs, prompting PC sellers to "move iron."

The end of the year is always a time of inventory disgorgementand deep discounting on old lines to make room for new models. Butthis year, PC product sellers have to push both new and oldequipment into markets with much softer-than-expected demand. Thegrowth in world PC sales is flattening out, says an IDC report.

Expect to see not just better prices, but also greatermanageability, which could reduce your after-sale costs, accordingto Gartner senior analyst Mark Margevicius. Other good news foryou: A slowdown in the pace of new software releases means hardwaredoesn't become obsolete as quickly, he says. You might squeezean extra few months out of your current PCs until resellers getreally desperate and/or you find a deal with the right terms.

Buy only as much machine as you really need for each worker, butbe aware that the growth of high-bandwidth multimedia applicationsfor the Web will require extra processing power for those directlyinvolved in e-commerce.

Mike Hogan, Entrepreneur's technology editor, canbe reached at mikehoganentrepreneur@juno.com.

Fall Fashions

As is its habit, Intel has released a bevy of newmicroprocessors and related component designs this season. That, inturn, is sending large PC-makers racing to discount old systems anddeliver new technology.

Computer options are dizzying, and PC World (www.pcworld.com) and PCMagazine (www.zdnet.com/pcmag) are goodplaces to find candidates for your short list. If it's worthyof coverage, it will be dissected in both magazines-and on theirrespective Web sites-in different ways.

Because of Intel's market reach, most of your PC optionsfeature "Intel Inside," although these days, AdvancedMicro Devices (AMD) is giving Intel a good run for your money. Evenif you don't buy an AMD-based machine, you'll still benefitfrom the increased price/development pressure it puts on Intel,says Roger Kay, manager of IDC's PC hardware group.

Unlike some of its chips in the past, the AMD technology oftoday is OK. AMD chips have no significant incompatibilities withsoftware designed for Intel machines, says Kay, and they'reused by brand names like HP, Compaq and Gateway. But Inteldominates PC hardware-not just processors, but also motherboards,chipsets and related components-and it drives most new PCtechnology initiatives.

At press time, PC-makers are still touching up their fall lines.But the harbingers of new hardware are the concept PCs Intelintroduced at its recent developers forum. As in any other fashionshow, some are a little too avant-garde for general consumption,like the Badis Badis with its movable cooling fins on top. But thefeatures in the concept PCs below are already starting to pop up inmore mainstream PCs:

Akeru: The Akeru is thehighest-performance concept PC, designed for full-media e-commerce,engineering or analytical applications. Powered by the new Pentium4 processor, it also has the latest chipset, system bus andgraphics enhancements. Its tool-free/screwless chassis, not muchlarger than a notebook computer stood on end, offers easy access toIntel's MicroATX form factor MB with its patented pop-outcomponents for upgrade or repair. Akeru's profile resembles thecurrent Compaq (www.compaq.com)iPAQ and Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) e-Vectra lines.

Enchant: Similarly, theEnchant resembles IBM's (www.ibm.com) NetVista X40, an all-in-onePC that earned Intel's Innovative PC award. Not your yuppiebrother's iMac, the sleek, black NetVista X40 merges the CPUinto the frame of a flat-panel LCD display. An optional IBMMicroDrive puts 1GB of storage on a disk the size of a quarter.

ICE: The ICE is a brick-likedesign that emphasizes connectivity. Destined to be anetwork-attached desktop PC and offering instant access to theInternet, the ICE has the least technology because it takesadvantage of the distributed resources of the networks to which itis attached.

The innovative case designs of some of these PCs are lessnoteworthy than the technology within, which makes something otherthan a beige box possible. With the goal of improving ease of use,Intel (and AMD, for that matter) has made the strategic decision tophase out old technologies and push harder on new ones.

For starters, you'll find many PC designs devoid of legacyPC interfaces-parallel, serial, PS/2-which are slow and just takeup motherboard space, says Steve Whalley, manager of Intel'sEase of Use Initiative. Intel shrunk its new FlexATX motherboard 30percent, in part by relying solely on the USB for mouse, keyboard,monitor and other peripheral connections.

USB is already present on 99 percent of new PCs shipped,according to Cahners In-Stat Group, and peripherals-makers arestarting to catch up. In-Stat sees USB peripheral shipmentsincreasing 141 percent this year. When an updated version of theUSB specification ships next year, adds Whalley, it will have 40times the current capacity and be able to handle dozens ofconnections simultaneously.

Also significant are LANs for resource sharing in small and homeoffices. All Intel's concept PCs have built-in Ethernetadaptors for access to resources distributed over a LAN or theInternet. This coming year, Bluetooth add-ons using USB ports willadd wireless connectivity for devices within a 30-foot radius, saysWhalley, followed by Bluetooth on motherboards in 2002.

Another challenge: minimizing heat and noise in a PC whiledownsizing its footprint and upping its processing power. Intel hasimproved its power management and heat dissipation techniques inits concept PCs; it started by taking the AC power supply entirelyout of the PC and making it an external "brick" likethose used for portables. Then it added smaller, quieter fans and,says Whalley, "moved around a lot of things to remove heatpassively using the chimney effect."

Air flow is helped by replacing ISA add-in card slots with new,low-profile, plug-and-play PCI bus slots. Plug-and-play hasn'talways worked as advertised, but your experience is due to improve,says Whalley, as peripheral driver writers focus on this new PCIstandard.

He also predicts delivery on another unfulfilled promise-theInstant On PC. Waking up a "sleeping" PC has been enoughhassle that many users just leave their PCs running all the time orshut them down completely, he says. Suspend-and-resume will workbetter in future PC models, says Whalley, because of greatercooperation among chipset-, BIOS- and OS-makers on the ACPI 2.0specification. Whalley adds that vendors also have worked togetherto reduce those long cold-boot and shutdown times to less than 30seconds.

Shopping Tips

The savings on a great price can be quickly lost if your vendordoesn't offer ways to reduce your after-sale maintenance costs,warns Margevicius. Gartner figures the cost of maintaining aWindows desktop at around $10,000 per year-mostly soft dollars paidin labor and lost productivity. Gartner counsels corporate clientsto cut time lost to PC support by buying systems from long-standingvendors who promise component compatibility for the life of thatmodel. Vendor software should let you inventory, troubleshoot andupdate software and drivers remotely over a LAN or the Internet.(The new technology initiatives help.)

Corporate purchasing managers are counseled to buy the mostadvanced PCs they can afford. But cash-strapped entrepreneurs canfind the same innovations in low-end PCs. "The low end has alot of computing power now," says Margevicius. "Even thecheapest PCs these days are powerful enough for 75 to 80 percent ofoffice productivity workers."

Close-out models haven't always been a bargain, since theywere soon outrun by the next generation of ever-more-demandingdesktop software. But the software release cycles have slowed down,while hardware performance continues to race ahead, saysMargevicius. Also, with distributed processing over LANs and theInternet taking hold, not everyone needs all their software andprocessing power in the PC. Reversing a trend, the useful life oftoday's average system is now 3½ to 4 years.

But always demand a three-year manufacturer's warranty withnext-business-day on-site repair, counsels Margevicius. Longerwarranties are too expensive; and, while still usable, the averagePC has no resale value after 2½ years.

So what do you do when an out-of-warranty PC breaks? Fix It? Noway. Says Margevicius. His painful advice: Get rid of it thecheapest way you can and buy a new one. Tough love, but with allthe new models coming out, there's no better of year to doit.

The Latest And Greatest

A closer look at Intel's Pentium 4 processor

Some jobs just need all the PC you can find. That's whyIntel's next-generation Pentium 4 processor was created.

The successor to Intel's 5-year-old P6 architecture, thefirst Pentium 4 clocks in at 1.4GHz and has plenty of power forfull-motion video, audio and 3-D applications from the Internet.Here's how it gets there:

A longer pipeline inside the main engine queues up threetimes as many instructions as the Pentium III.

The instructions are processed in optimum order, rather thanin the sequence they were received.

A separate engine processes frequently usedinstructions-specifically, integer-based math-twice as fast as themain processing unit.

An improved Execution Trace Cache arranges predigestedinstructions in the best order.

A 400MHz system bus three times faster than the PentiumIII's 133MHz bus can transport 64-byte-not just32-byte-instructions from main memory.

Graphics and sound are processed faster using 144 newmultimedia instructions.