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Saturday, May 8, 2004

Show #37

Live from the nation’s capitol today.

Coming up: interviews with the first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn, and the Chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell.

Mike in Lake Arrowhead is buying a digital camera for vacation. Since he never does 8×10 or larger images he’s thinking of buying a lower resolution camera and spending the difference on a better zoom. As long as you’re 3–4 megapixels you’re high enough resolution for all but the most demanding photgs. I recommend cameras from the good 35 mm manufacturers because they have the best glass: Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Fuji. My current fave is the Nikon D70 - it’s 6MP and $1299.

Daniel in Arcadia has some bad RAM. Test it with Goldmem.

Douglas in Chino Hills says his sister has two worms and wants to help her. If you know which worms you can download disinfecting tools from the anti-virus companies. For example, Symantec has free removal tools for most of the common worms here. I would also recommend running an anti-virus on the system - best way is to boot to a CD with the anti-virus on it. You can also use a web based anti-virus like Housecall. Going forward I recommend the free AVG Anti-Virus. Keep it up to date, though!

Wayne in Akron says it’s time to upgrade his Tivo. He’s wondering if a 7200 RPM drive is ok. Absolutely. The Tivo is designed to use slow hard drives - there’s no need to spend more for a faster drive. The 5400 RPM drives are cooler, too. I do recommend Maxtor drives because that’s what Tivo uses. For information on upgrading visit the Tivo Community Forum or Dealdatabase. I also recommend buying drives from Weaknees.

John Glenn’s full interview will debut during The Screensavers in Washington week on TechTV - May 24–28. Next time you’re in the DC area you must visit the new National Air & Space Museum’s Udvay-Hazy Center - it’s amazing!

Nicole in San Francisco wants to build her own PC. But where do you start? Your first choice is which microprocessor to use. That choice will determine where you go from there. I recommend AMD. Get an Athlon XP 3000+ with the 200 mhz bus (as little as $137) or for top of the line performance the 64 FX (for about $700!). Then choose a motherboard that supports the chip. For AMD I like the nVidia nForce chipsets. But do read the motherboard and chipset reviews on AnandTech.

(Get your geek pride t-shirt from thegeekout.com)

Ray in Los Angeles is sick of the viruses and spyware on Windows. He’s thinking of buying a used Macintosh iBook. I encourage him to do so. Don’t get anything more than two years old, though - a G3 500 Mhz or better - and make sure to have at least 384MB of RAM. OS X is a great operating system and fairly easy to use, although you will have to retrain your fingers.