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Computer Q&A ; Laptop's Lifespan at Least 5 Years

Posted on: Wednesday, 30 November 2005, 09:00 CST

By James Coates

Q: I have a daughter going to college next year, and I'm planning to buy her a laptop. I'm hoping to get something not only good now but that will not become obsolete over the four or five years of college.

What is generally recommended in terms of a laptop's technical capability/requirements? I'm presuming Windows XP and Microsoft Word/ Excel/PowerPoint as required operating system and software. I know I don't want to rely on a salesperson giving me recommendations.

-- Ken Kaminksi@aol.com

A: Your answer, Mr. K, lies in the fact that when it comes to bread-and-butter computing, obsolete isn't as bad as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs want you to think. As these tech mavens will tell you, five years from now just about every bit of electronic gear that surrounds us today, computers most certainly included, will be obsolete.

Think back. If you wanted Internet access at a Starbucks five years ago, you would have needed to get the manager to loan you his telephone. America Online's slow dial-up product was the most commonly used Web and e-mail portal, and computers finally were coming with built-in 56,000 kilobit-per-second modems. Computers were based on the Pentium II at 600 megahertz and were a great many times slower than today's Pentium 4 3.6 gigahertz howlers.

Back then, most folks got by with 128 megabytes of RAM, which today would clog a computer so badly that Web surfing would have to be done without streaming video and audio downloads.

That little trip down memory lane should tell you this: Bells and whistles change quickly, but the basics endure. All the software you mentioned, Word/Excel/PowerPoint and such, would be running just as well on a year 2000 PC as it runs on one of today's multimedia monsters. This little-discussed reality is a big reason that technology sales have flattened.

By 2000, computers had reached the levels of speed and data storage to handle just about every computing process a business needs. They remain at that level.

So here's the bottom line: Nobody wants to be saddled with an obsolete computer, but it looks very much like in five years obsolete will be just fine for workaday computing, including all Web stuff shy of high-speed, full-screen video. Use price and the reputation of the seller when you buy.

However, nobody can accurately say where technology will be in the next half decade. I'm betting you will be using your wide- screen digital television set for the Web, your video-capable cell phone for e-mail and your Bluetooth plasma iPod linked to citywide Wi-Fi to do much of the stuff we now do with multimedia computers.

That means look for a solid laptop with a mobile-optimized Intel Celeron or AMD chip with built-in wireless Internet and at least 512 mb of RAM, a DVD player, a CD burner and 60 gigabytes of hard-drive space. That should be enough in 2010, just as the baseline computers from 2000 work quite nicely here in 2005.

>Removing Rundll?

Q: Each time I turn on my computer, my screen shows a logo named Rundll and asks me to respond OK. How might I correct this? The message: "Error loading C:

Program Files

wild tangent

apps

cda

cda engine 0400.D22. The specified module could not be found."

I do not know how to delete this. Any suggestions?

-- Donald Brown@aol.com

A: Your note is quite calm compared with the waves of other victims of what appears to be poor programming by a Web-game- playing service called Wild Tangent Inc.

The company has responded to the howls of complaint by assuring callers that there is no spyware involved, just software glitches in something called a Web driver designed to facilitate online-game playing.

Adding to the displeasure is that the glitch you have can be fixed only by uninstalling the software, and that is nasty business because the necessary steps to fix it are terribly complicated.

They involve making a large number of changes to the Windows registry and are posted at this address:http:// support.wildgames.com/uninstall.html/.

e-mail: jcoates@tribune.com

Source: Buffalo News

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