NEXT MONTHLETTERS POLICY Please send your questions and comments to comments@maxi-
mumpc.com. Include your full name, city of residence, and phone number with your
correspondence. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Due to the amount of
mail we receive, we are unable to respond personally to all queries.COMING IN
MAXIMUMPC’s
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxtoo is dot pitch—some
manufacturers measure on
the horizontal (which pro-
duces a smaller number),
some on the diagonal. It’s
true that a 27-inch screen
with a 1920x1200 res has
a greater dot pitch than a
24-inch screen of the same
res—.30mm vs. .27mm—but
in our experience this hasn’t
proved detrimental, all other
things being equal. Yes, text
appears slightly more coarse
with a bigger dot pitch if
you examine it up close, but
a larger monitor lets you
view things from further
away—which we appreciate.In other types of content—
movies, games, digital
pics—we haven’t discerned
any visible difference from
a .30mm pitch on a quality
monitor. You’re unlikely to
see a dot pitch higher than
that on a desktop display.
But your point is well taken;
we’ll be sure to point out
when a difference in dot
pitch is notable.SSDs: The Untold
Story
Love the mag, but I’m really
disappointed that STEC’s
solid state drives weren’t fea-
tured in the November issue’s
SSD roundup. STEC claims to
have the fastest SLC-based
SSDs on the planet.
Intel just released some
new standard form-factor
SSDs, too, so I would love to
see how they perform, as well.
—JeffSenior Editor Gordon Mah
Ung Responds: While we
haven’t gotten our hands
on any STEC drives as of
yet, we just finished testing
Intel’s X25-M (page 90). In
a nutshell, it’s big, fast, and
affordable. We’ll seek out an
STEC drive, as well as Super
Talen’s new SLC-based SSD,
which claims to be the new
benchmark buster.Partition Omission
The last two or three
articles about assembling
a new computer haven’t
said anything about parti-
tioning and formatting thehard drive before installing
the OS. Are these steps no
longer necessary or was
this an oversight?
—Jim HarrisEditor in Chief Will Smith
Responds: Well, Jim, the
Windows installers will take
care of the grunt work of
partitioning and formatting
your disk for you. The only
time you need to manually set
up partitions is if you want to
either dual boot different OSes
or store Windows and your
data on different partitions.
Vista (and to a lesser extent
XP) don’t deal with multiple
partitions particularly well.
With free utilities that let you
resize your partitions on the
fly—such as the one built into
Vista or GParted—getting your
partition sizes right at install
isn’t as critical now as it was
a few years ago. If you wantto resize your partitions, see
our GParted how-to at http://
tinyurl.com/6oxvst.Colossal Oversight
“The 9 Most Powerful
Computers of All Time”
(The List, November 2008),
was a very well thought out
list. However, I must point
out the omission of what
would no doubt have been
ranked second (no one can
argue against M5’s first-
place ranking): Colossus.
Let me enlighten you to a
few of its abilities: Colossus was designed to
take control of all U.S. and
Allied nuclear missiles—it
launches one and shoots
down one (it even deto-
nates them in the silos).
It discovers (on its own)
a hidden Russian-built
supercomputer (Guardian)
and starts communica-
tions with it, discovers
mathematics formerly
unknown to man, and
then creates a new binary
language that only they
can understand.
The two supercomputers
merge in to one (and
you know the American
computer is the dominant
one, as they take the name
Colossus).
In the end, Colossus takes
on a god-like view of the
human race by declaring
itself the ruler of the world
and saying that in time the
human race will come to
respect and love him.How you left this com-
puter off the list is, in the
words of Nomad (another
computer left off the list),
“Error!”
—John W. Cranford Jr.LETTERS POLICY Please send your questions and comments to comments@maxi-
mumpc.com. Include your full name, city of residence, and phone number with your
correspondence. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Due to the amount of
mail we receive, we are unable to respond personally to all queries.HOW YOU LEFT THIS COMPUTER
OFF THE LIST IS, IN THE WORDS
OF NOMAD (ANOTHER COMPUTER
LEFT OF THE LIST), “ERROR!”
http://www.maximumpc.comwww.maximumpc.com||DECDEC 08 08 ||MAMAMAMAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUUUUUMMMMPPPPPPCCCC|| 103103
Intel’s fi rst true quad core
has fi nally arrived, and
we’ve got it in the Lab. We
benchmark Nehalem and
fi nd out if it’s got the juice to
keep AMD in second place.Intel’s Core i7—First
Benchmarks!
ULTIMATE
Antivirus Roundup!
In our biggest antivirus
roundup ever, we pit the
leading AV apps against one
another in the ultimate battle
royal. Will McAfee, Symantec,
Kaspersky, F-Protect, AVG,
Nod32, PC Tools, or Avast!
win the belt?NEXT MONTHWindows Tips:
Fact or Fiction
We test and review common
Windows tips to show you
which ones work and which
don’t. You won’t believe this
story!COMING IN
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