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 now, behind the scenes, that we haven’t had time to complete a number of articles that we've been working on. However, this week we’ll get back into the swing of things as we have a few of then we're 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.

Furthermore we're talking to AMD about a possible evaluation of their Opteron server platform and might be able to get them to okay a real life test of a dual Opteron server. As we detailed last week, we've lost one of webservers to a surging powersupply and this would be an excellent opportunity to see how a dual Opteron performs as a database/webserver. I personally think, from studying the specifications of the platform and comparing those to the requirements of our particular application, that this could prove to be a very capable and fast platform. So we'll see how AMD responds, we're willing and able to go the extra mile and put in the needed time, effort and resources, let's see if they're up for a real life challenge.

Sander Sassen.