Timothy Parker Consulting Incorporated

Questions and Answers, Part 13

Q: With the IDE drives getting higher in capacity, I have to wonder if there’s a limit.  I also heard that most PCs can’t handle larger drives.  What’s the story?

A: You’re dealing with two things in one question: technological limit and a hardware-software imposed limit.  To deal with the technological limit first, there is continual advancement in hard drive technology and we’re likely to see drives getting larger and larger in the near future.  We’re already over 100GB for an IDE drive, and that will be doubled in the next year or two. More importantly is the fact that all PCs have an upper limit in the amount of disk space supported on an IDE drive (no such limit exists for SCSI).  When the IDE standard was adopted, a 28-bit address for each sector was used.  Since most sectors on an IDE drive are 512 bytes, we can calculate the maximum allowed space on the drive. This provides an upper limit of 137GB per IDE drive that the BIOS and Windows can access on an IDE drive.  To bypass this already-reached limit (although the drives are not currently shipping), hard-drive manufacturers have upgraded the ATA specification to use a 48-bit address for sectors on the drives. In order to use this new specification, both a new driver for Windows (or whatever operating system is used) and a new BIOS for the motherboard is required, although some add-in cards will undoubtedly provide the same BIOS upgrade on a PCI card soon.  The new specification is adopted already and we’ll start to see drives exceeding the 137GB limit using these new drivers within the year.  (For the record, the 48-bit address gives an upper limit on the new ATA standard of 144 Petabytes, which is more than all the servers in the world currently have available for storage.)

Q: I’m relatively new to the business and am confused about the different socket numbers for AMD and Intel chips.  Can you help?

A: Of course! There are four common sockets in use today. Socket 370 is used for Intel Celeron and Pentium III chips with a bus speed of 66MHz, 100MHz, and 133MHz. In theory, it can handle a 1.2GHz Pentium III, and perhaps faster with some tricks. Socket 423 is the Intel Pentium 4 socket with a bus speed of 400MHz. A newer socket for faster bus speeds, called the Socket 478, has already replaced it.  Most motherboards for Pentium 4s will use the new Socket 478 now, and can support CPU speeds to 3GHz.  On the AMD front, socket 462A is used for Duron, Athlon, and Athlon MP CPUs.  It is capable of bus speeds of 200MHz and 266MHz.

Q: I have a customer who buys many Windows 98 machines but wants Netscape Navigator installing and Internet Explorer removing completely.  I have been manually uninstalling it and removing all the associated files individually, one by one.  Is there a simpler way.

A: There are two simpler ways I can think of, both using utilities.  The best is IEradicator, an EXE file that removes IE files. After a reboot, you’ve got 30MB of disk space recovered and removed IE completely. I’ve used it on versions of IE from 3.0 up to 5.5, and it works well. You can find the utility on many download sites on the Web: search for the name and you’ll get lots of hits. Another utility worth using is 98lite, available at www.98lite.com. It converts most active desktop components, on-line service installers, and IE into packages that can be safely and completely removed by the Add/Remove Program applet in the Control Panel.

Q: I’ve been using Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4, but I get lots of bad burns and expensive, wasted CD-Rs.  Will the upgrade to Creator version 5 help?

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Last modified: January 23, 2007