Hi All,
Just had the occasion to meet with some people with some incidental interesting news - the PCI-E interface slot is soon going to be the (doubtless temporary) industry standard.
This has created problems for his company, as they use a custom I/F board and code that utilize the PCI interface standard. For them, it's a lot of stuff to throw in the dumper and have to start over.
For the rest of us, any I/O cards that might have carried over into a new computer are going to become worthless in the near future. From something as trivial as a modem card to a really good sound card - all gone.
I was a bit po'ed to find my reasonably good graphics card using AGP was no longer useable in any new motherboard. Soon, all those old cards are gonna be goners. The up-and-coming motherboards will have only PCI-E slots.
Of course it's cheaper to only have one kind of I/O slot to have to support from the manufacturer's standpoint, but cutting off backwards compatibilty like that is rude at best.
Have fear, too. Vista has shipped, so your new computer will likely have that turkey installed by January. Remember that IE7 - now a critical update item - had three critical updates issued within the first week of its release. Wonder how long it's going to be before XP has gone the way of '98, ME and 2000?
Just had the occasion to meet with some people with some incidental interesting news - the PCI-E interface slot is soon going to be the (doubtless temporary) industry standard.
This has created problems for his company, as they use a custom I/F board and code that utilize the PCI interface standard. For them, it's a lot of stuff to throw in the dumper and have to start over.
For the rest of us, any I/O cards that might have carried over into a new computer are going to become worthless in the near future. From something as trivial as a modem card to a really good sound card - all gone.
I was a bit po'ed to find my reasonably good graphics card using AGP was no longer useable in any new motherboard. Soon, all those old cards are gonna be goners. The up-and-coming motherboards will have only PCI-E slots.
Of course it's cheaper to only have one kind of I/O slot to have to support from the manufacturer's standpoint, but cutting off backwards compatibilty like that is rude at best.
Have fear, too. Vista has shipped, so your new computer will likely have that turkey installed by January. Remember that IE7 - now a critical update item - had three critical updates issued within the first week of its release. Wonder how long it's going to be before XP has gone the way of '98, ME and 2000?