[rant] A sad week for the Bitsifter desktop. It time for Spring-Cleaning and that means sifting through the office to get rid of unused software and hardware.

Several older version of Microsoft Office were punted in favor for Office97. While the meta-suite is a total disk hog, the tools provide a familiar and useful environment. For those wondering whatever happened to Microsoft Bob, just hit F1 in any of the applications and you'll be greeted by Mr. Paper Clip, you very own digital assistant. Like Microsoft Bob, the novelty of such helpers wears off after 2-3 minutes.

A whole slew of Microsoft programming reference manuals were chucked in the cleaning partly because they've rapidly become out of date, but also because the tools to hunt down information in on-line references are now sophisticated enough to handle data hungry programmers. Fingers are crossed that Microsoft's new HTML-based help system does gum up the works.

The final victim of spring clean should have been the hardest decision to make, it was the PowerMac 8500. I'm fortunate in that I've every major computer ethnicity on my desktop, a Pentium Pro 200Mhx running NT 4.0,a Sun UltraSparc, and the Mac. Deciding to give the Mac away was as easy as counting the number times any given machine would crash during the course of a week. The final count: UltraSparc: 0, Pentium: 1, and Mac: 3 times a day (Once a day even if I wasn't using it).

In the early days of Windows, frequent reboots were pretty much the norm. It came with the territory, but in a world were crashing a Unix box is an act of God and crashing an NT box isn't trivial to do, the Mac is totally outclassed - it doesn't matter if it's "one click simple" if it suddenly crashes when nobody is looking.

[sift this] During the late 80s and early 90s, the Dad got bored of teaching semiconductor physics all over the planet and started an in-house computer manufacturing company. His market was small to medium sized companies that weren't ready for a full-blown MIS department, but still needed on-site technicians to maintain hardware and software. He ended building a new house on the property just to house the growing computer business.

One of the advantages the business had was that they offered completely customized hardware. If you wanted the latest in hard drive technology, but didn't care much about the video card and monitor, the company could handle it. They just bought the parts and put the machine together. It was an ideal situation until the likes of Dell, Compaq, and Gateway got into a price war that caused system costs nose dive. Dad's comfortable price margins shrank in order to compete and within a few years, the company closed shop.

Price Watch represents a site Dad's company could've used to stay solvent. Using proprietary search engine, web spider, and data entry tools, the site provides what they believe to be the lowest street prices for any piece of computer hardware or software. For example, if you're looking a 200Mhz Pentium Pro, you type in the information and Price Watch returns with a table of all vendors offering the CPU in order of price, lowest to highest. (Note: When I looked at the CPU, the prices ranged from $480-$700 for the exact same piece of hardware)

For the geeks who think they've found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, be warned, you get what you pay for. Price Watch is an independent research firm and provides no information about the reliability of the vendors it provides information on. Additionally, it is wise to remember that, like the stock market, the price of high demand items is likely to fluctuate over a matter of hours.

At any rate, the existence of Price Watch is a tribute to the manner that Web-based applications can harness and present enormous amounts of data. With some planning, small companies, like Dad's, will be able to find the lowest price on equipment and still have respectable price margins.