Okay, granted, things have been rather slow around here and I apologize for that, it is not that we don’t have anything to talk about, it is just that we have so many things going on right here, behind the scenes, that we haven’t had time to post new articles. However, this week we’ll get back into the swing of things, Dan has taken some time off his busy schedule to write up another article and I have a few I’m just about finishing up.

As I mentioned in the previous column the PC industry is in a bit of slump with very little exciting products coming out, most of the products we’ve seen are a rehash or upgrade from a previous product and not really worth getting all excited about. What do we have in store then? Like I mentioned I looked at some popular home theatre projectors and being a home theatre enthusiast myself I obviously could not resist putting three entry models through their paces, just look at the picture below and you’ll see what I’m talking about.



Fig 1. The three projectors we evaluated for home theatre use, a Dell, a InFocus and a Sanyo.
There’s three of them that I particularly want to tell you about and that’s, from top to bottom, the Dell 2100MP, the InFocus X1 and the Sanyo PLV-Z1. I was pleasantly surprised by the InFocus X1 that due to its current low price, $899 after a $100 rebate, offers an excellent deal. But don’t let me get ahead of myself, I’ll detail all of our findings in the upcoming article that’ll also cover some of the myths surrounding projectors and offer your plenty of background info to talk any sales rep under the table.

In the meanwhile we’ve been sitting on this server upgrade forever and made some people at Tyan very unhappy (sorry Sandy!) but we’ll get the new server installed soon, the old one has just been working out so well and had not the slightest problem handling the traffic that we took some extra time to further perfect our database server and make sure all was working as planned. Nothing has changed on the hardware side though, we’re still using a Tyan motherboard and two 2.8GHz Xeons, plenty fast, and lots of built in reserve, we did not even tax it during the evaluation and configuration so we’re confident that it’ll be plenty fast until we hit that 40-million pageviews per month milestone.

Sander Sassen.