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Leo Laporte's 2006 Technology Almanac: A Look into March

Mar 3, 2006

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Leo Laporte's 2006 Technology Almanac

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THURSDAY: MARCH 2, 2006

THIS WEEK’S FOCUS: Upgrading Your PC

UPGRADING FOR DIGITAL VIDEO EDITING

Do you make your own home movies? Then you’ll want to turn your PC into a video editing studio—which is especially easy if you have a digital video (DV) camcorder. You might need to beef up your hardware a bit, however, because video editing is one of the most demanding applications for a computer system.

Assuming you have a fairly powerful microprocessor to start with, the first thing you’ll probably need to upgrade is your hard disk. Raw digital video takes up about 3.6MB for each second of footage; work with an hour-long movie, and you’ll fill up two-thirds of a 20GB disk. So a big—no, make that a huge—hard disk is a necessity. Some users simply add a second hard drive to their system, dedicated solely to video editing. Whatever you do, make sure it’s a fast disk; choose an IDE drive with a 7,200 RPM spin rate, or (if you’re flush) a SCSI drive. And when you install the drive, format it with the NTFS file system if you can.

Memory is also important. Lots of it. Like 1GB worth, at a minimum. Any less and you’ll find your system slows down considerably when processing all that digital video data. And while we’re on the subject of memory, it helps to have a video card with lots of onboard memory. For best performance, look for a card with 64MB or 128MB video RAM.

Finally, consider going with a big monitor—the easier to view your movies with. In fact, you might think about a dual-monitor system, so you can edit on one screen and view your results on the other.

ON THIS DAY: FIRST PUSH-BUTTON PHONE (1959)

On this day in 1959, an experimental push-button phone was tested by the Southern New England Telephone Company in New Haven, Connecticut. The test was designed to see whether customers dialed fewer wrong numbers using the new push-button design.

SOFTWARE OF THE WEEK: ALOHA BOB PC RELOCATOR

When you’re migrating from an old computer to a newer one, the most difficult task is moving all your old files and settings from one machine to another. The task is made a little easier with Aloha Bob PC Relocator, a nifty little upgrade/transfer program. Buy it for $29.95 from http://www.alohabob.com.

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