SITE VISIT

For my site visit I went to Best Buy in the Richardson/Plano area. During this time I played on computer, flat screen monitors, printers, scanners, CD burners and read a lot about programs.

The computers that I was playing on, all came in bundles that a certain monitor comes with the CPU. One of the shockers was that one or two actually was having a sale that if you get a certain computer, you get this particular monitor. You also get a nice looking but lower end color InkJet printer as a package. I thought this was rather neat to see because when the new college freshmen start getting ready for college they could get a monitor, computer and color InkJet printer as a starter. Granted if one were smart they would look at the printer and see how many pages it prints in a minute for color and black and white. It was rather slow but one could get an updated printer that prints faster for both color and black and white with a rebate that is not too far from the lower end printer.

I did have fun reading the scanners information. Some of the functions that some scanners did were rather cool. Some of them had a button that allows you to scan a picture and the picture would go directly to your message an attachment file. There were even buttons for the scanner to scan and send it directly to your printer. That was rather impressive.

CD burners are getting faster and faster. I saw a HP CD burner for 16x10x40. I do not remember exactly what came on my computer but I know that it was fast. I did read an article saying that Plextor’s CD burner for the same speeds was actually the best one on the market due to the sound that the burner makes during the burning process.

The flat screen monitors have come a long way. I remember looking at them a few years ago and the price just said to me, “Keep on walking!” The color resolutions have gotten better since then too. The price are coming down rather nice which means that five to ten years from now, flat screen monitors will be more accepted verses these huge monitors that we look at.

I spent some time reading the boxes for the following programs: Microsoft Office XP (2002), Microsoft Windows 2000 (not that many on the shelves yet), Microsoft FrontPage XP, Norton Systemworks Professional, Norton Firewall, and MusicMatch Plus. I asked one of the employees: “I read in PC World that Windows 2000 is so much better. In your opinion how does Windows 2000 compare to Windows ME (Millennium Edition)?” He really could not answer that question since he has even seen Windows 2000 on a machine yet. This lead me to think about looking at the computer they were selling to see if any of them had Windows 2000 running on them. I was not able to look since they had the computers screen saver protect: “How are the buyers suppose to decided what computer they want when the screen savers are password protected?” During my reading of Microsoft’s Office I was not convinced on why I should really think hard about purchasing this program right then and there. The reason I even looked at MusicMatch Plus program is because I have the free version on my computer and I wanted to see what the programs sells for in stores.