Keep IT in the family

The trouble with the family PC is that it is designed for a family of one. What happens when everyone wants to finish their homework on Sunday evening? Or when Dad wants to check his email, Mum needs to do the accounts, and Jane and John have reached the eye-gouging stage over who has first go with Carmageddon?

In the age of the second car, the second bathroom and the second telephone line, it is surely asking too much to expect us to survive with just the one PC. This is also the age of the second mortgage,and stumping up #1,500 for Wintel's latest multimedia monster is still a chip too far for most.

It's a funny thing, but while Moore's first law states that the performance of PCs doubles every year or so, his second law (unaccountably absent from most textbooks on Intel) states that they never get any cheaper.

And his third law (often mistakenly ascribed to Michael Parkinson) states that software expands to fill the space available before you can say 'the world's richest man who lives in a cave'.

So when US retail chain Microcenter put a multimedia PC on sale for $499, it is not entirely surprising that it shifted 5,000 in the first three days. The PC in question was based on Cyrix' MediaGX, which flies in the face of convention by being cheaper and simpler than its predecessors by virtue of putting the video, sound, bus and memory controllers on the main processor chip, and then soldering the thing onto the motherboard - no weasel-word promises about upgradability or future-proofing here. Rocket science it ain't. The top speed is a measly 200MHz, and Jane and John will still be pulling each other's hair out to get on the Pentium II with AGP to play their games.

But for Dad's email or Mum's accounts it will prove to be more than adequate, and $500 seems a small price to pay for domestic peace.

Intel sort of pooh-poohs the idea. But it is taking time off from developing its 64-bit mainframe on a chip - codenamed Merced - to design budget versions of Pentium II without all that fancy cache and other frills, and is making noises about wanting to compete on price all the way down the market.

With AMD promising to get ahead for the first time with 300MHz chips for notebook PCs, and with a kind of super MMX for 3D graphics, maybe the self-confessedly paranoid Intel is getting twitchy about its policy of always abandoning the middle and lower ground to its competitors.

I have never entirely approved of the PC industry's headlong dash to make simple things more complicated (I am writing this article using Q&A Write 3 on a 286), so I feel I have found a kindred spirit in the plucky little MediaGX. Perhaps owning a second PC will become a status symbol after all. I foresee a lucrative little sideline in bumper stickers proclaiming that 'my other PC is a Merced'.

Paul Bray is a freelance IT journalist.