Thanks for inviting me to come and speak. I’m honored to be asked to speak to the Burley Lions club. Many of you I esteem as pillars in our community. I do hope to share some information today that will help everyone to work smarter & more cost effectively with respect to computers.

When I first became interested in computers in the early eighties, a 128kB memory chip cost $100. You heard me right, I said 128kB not 128MB. So at that rate to combine the 128kB chips to make a 256MB chip would have cost over $200,000. They sell today for about $50.

Ten years ago I was part of Hewlett Packard’s new product design team in Boise. We were working on this remarkable hard disk drive that would drop the price of storage from over $2/MB to about $1.65/MB. We developed this 2GB Hard drive that sold for $3299 and consisted of 10 platters 5 ¼ inches wide. This was excited for the computer industry and HP sold thousands per day. A few years later in 1997 the biggest hard drive you could by was a 16GB drive that cost $3999 and consisted of 10 platters 3 ½ inches wide (half as big physically, 8 times more capacity), which is a cost of $.25/MB. Today we sell a 300GB drive for $299 that consists of 2 platters 3 ½ inches wide, that’s about $.001/MB. It doesn’t stop there; I have a hard drive that is less than 2” wide that holds 60GB. Can you see where this is heading? Mobil! This hard drive is possibly larger in capacity than the drive in your office computer and it can fit into a cell phone or PDA. Intel is pushing mobility very aggressively. You have probably heard the ads for Intel’s Centrino Mobil Technology. It consists of laptops that are very efficient (5 to 8 hour battery life) yet powerful, and support wireless networking. The world is accepting mobility like wildfire. Two years ago there were about 10000 hot spots in the USA. Today there are over 70000 hotspots, mostly airports and hotels. There are even a few hotspots here in Burley. Most are un-intentional, due to lack of security measures. There is an intentional hot spot in front of Greener Valley Computer, where you can pull into my parking lot and connect to the internet with a wireless laptop. I am working to extend that signal farther up Overland Ave. I have already been able to check my email from 5 miles away from my store with a special antenna.

Going back to security, how many of you got the Blaster Worm? (About 5 hands rose.) Microsoft had a fix that would have prevented Blaster infections in June of 2003. The worm did not start appearing until August 2003. If you were doing the free monthly updates from Microsoft, you would not have been infected. This week Microsoft made available 5 new critical updates, that experts say, if not installed another rash of infections could occur within about two weeks. Also, keep your antivirus software updated. If you have high speed internet, use a firewall. Recently, spy ware has been the biggest cause of computer downtime. The new Norton Antivirus 2004 also stops spy ware.

At Greener Valley Computer Store we offer new computer equipment as well as repair. We also repair Notebook computers and printers. The staff at Greener Valley Computer puts together a monthly computer tip, with helps that we see may be needed, based on the problems in the area. If you would like to be on the list to receive a monthly emailed computer tip, send your email address to greener@pmt.org

Thank you again,

Brent Greener