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The giants of computer chipmaking -- Intel and AMD -- regularly boast about the processing speeds of their products. But when it comes down to buying your next personal computer or handheld, what really matters when it comes to processor speed?

In his weekly Fast Forward column, personal tech expert Rob Pegoraro looks into the processor speed debate and offers some tips to consumers about what they should look for when gauging computer products.

Submit your questions and comments: Rob Pegoraro for a live online discussion of this topic on Monday, Sept. 9 at 2 p.m EDT.

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Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

washingtonpost.com: We'll be getting started in just a few minutes. Please keep submitting your questions and comments!

Rob Pegoraro: Good afternoon--today's kind of a grab-bag of topics. Yesterday I wrote about processor speeds (how hard it is to tell which chip is "fastest," and if that actually matters); the week before, I reviewed the Handspring Treo 300, a combination cell phone and handheld organizer. Two weeks ago, I tried out Jaguar, Apple's new version of Mac OS X. I see we've got questions on two of those three topics, plus a bunch of other issues (surge protectors, firewall software).

So: Let's get going here...

Falls Church, Va.: Hey, word has it that Microsoft has released an XP update. Had a chance to look at it? How good a job did they do?

Rob Pegoraro: That's my column topic for Sunday. I've tried the major part of this "Service Pack 1" release--a control panel that lets you select your preferred Web browser, e-mail client, media player and so on--already, since it came with the "service pack 3" update to Windows 2000 a few weeks ago. It's a great option, long overdue in Windows. But because the developers of these kinds of programs need to revise them to tell this control panel of their existence, it doesn't seem to show that I have any options beyond Microsoft's own programs at the moment.

Alexandria, Va.: Thanks for the excellent article about processor speed. I've wondered if lightning-fast processors were worth the price. One question: have you mentioned Hal Speed to your Post colleague Gene Weingarten? For a computer guy worried about quick processors, that's quite the aptonym.

Rob Pegoraro: Yes; the AMD publicists assured me that was his real name. (I also talked to a guy at IBM, William Osbourne, whose nickname was "Ozzie"; unfortunately, I didn't have any room to quote him as well.)

Fairfax County, Va.: Rob, I was driving down Rt. 1 south of Alexandria yesterday and I saw a bunch of official Apple signage on a less-than-first-class building. My wife said she thought the signs said it was an Apple service center. As a Mac G4 owner, that caught my eye. Do you know anything about this place?

Rob Pegoraro: Nope, but I doubt it's an Apple Store. Apply only puts those in high-dollar retail locations. Could be an independent Apple dealer (I heard of one that opened up shop on Rt. 1 a few months ago.)

College Park, Md.: Have you seen any of the new VIA fanless CPU's in action? I've read mixed reviews.

Rob Pegoraro: I haven't, but I'm curious to see how well the concept works. (This is a design for a lower-power processor that would eliminate the need for a noisy cooling fan--a wonderful idea if it's achievable without trading off too much in the way of performance.)

Herndon, Va.: So, except for the eggheads up at M.I.T., does it really matter for most users if their PC has an AMD or Intel chip?

Rob Pegoraro: Nope. AMD's chips usually cost a little less, and they formerely offered a better choice of types of memory than the Pentium 4 did. But the latter difference has pretty much gone away, leaving $$ the sole determinant for most desktop uses.

Silver Spring, Md.: Okay, my cell phone contract has run out and I want to buy a new one. Verizon's v60i seems like state of the art, but I don't want to have phone envy in 2 weeks. Know of anything new on the way?

Rob Pegoraro: That is a rather stylish phone. It's been out a while, so there could be something cooler on the way--but you never know. OTOH, the newest, swankest phones also cost a lot. If you can get a good deal on the v60i today (esp. if it's less than the $250 Verizon quotes on its Web site), go ahead and buy it.

Bethesda, Md.: Have you heard any processor matching speeds with the new dual G4s from Apple?

Rob Pegoraro: No, I havne't seen any third-party benchmark tests (if that's what you mean). I can tell you that for the dual 1.25-GHz machine, Apple quoted me a time of 30 minutes to encode an hour of video into the MPEG-2 format used on DVDs. Sonic Solutions, which makes DVD-authoring software for PCs, told me that the same job would take maybe 40 minutes on a high-end Pentium 4 desktop.

Your mileage may vary, of course...

wiredog: From the column "Before you splurge on a faster processor, upgrade the memory, the video card, the hard drive, the monitor or even the mouse. "

I seem to recall that being the standard advice ten years ago on the grounds that what would you do with 75 MHz anyway. GUI's answered that question.

That said, I'm doing just fine with a 1GHz machine (with 256 Mb ram and 20 Gb hard drive. No, I don't do MP3's.) It's used mostly for web+email, sometimes compiles, but even scripting languages (Python, etc)run faster than compiled code did a couple years ago.

Run Linux, of course, and Mozilla 1.0 (love that pop-up disabling, and tabbed browsing.)

p.s. Did I tell you about the head crash on the old 10 Gb hard drive? The one that happened the day /after/ I'd done the full backup?

Rob Pegoraro: Yup--Windows and the Mac OS (and, for that matter, KDE and Gnome, the desktop environments you'll see on most Linux machines) made faster CPUs a requirement 10 years ago. But what's the next huge interface advance that's going to drive the next 10 years of processor upgrades?

I asked that question of a few different people and didn't get any solid answers. Some folks think 3D interfaces will happen (if so, won't most the extra work fall to the graphics card on your machine?). I thought speech recognition might also become important, but it looks like processor speed isn't so important there as you'd think.

Alexandria, VA: On a different note entirely: DAT recorders. It's technology, but I'm not sure if it's the technology you talk about... I'm ready to make my first portable DAT purchase for samples on an album I'm recording - just stuff from the street, etc. Can you suggest a good price range or model?

Rob Pegoraro: Sorry, I can't. Digital Audio Tape is a niche technology if there ever was one, and yours is the first reader question I have ever gotten about it in this forum. Can anybody help out Alexandria?

Philadelphia, PA: re: Treo 300

OK. I have a dependable handspring Visor Pro and like the PDA functions of the Treo line (especially the built-in keyboard..)

But for Handspring to team up with Sprint (notoriously overpriced, bad connections and worse customer service) and "bet the farm" on this kind of partnership seems to smack of a desperation move to try and get some kind of acceptance for the PDA/Phone combo.

Are there ANY good Palm PDA/Phone combos out there or coming? Kyocera? Danger's new Hiptop/Sidekick?

Rob Pegoraro: My understanding is that Sprint made Handspring some sort of favorable deal to get an exclusive on selling the Treo 300. I would have preferred to be able to choose between Verizon and Sprint myself.

You will have choices, though. Kyocera is coming out with a successor to the 6035 Smartphone (the first Palm/phone combo I actually liked) which will include a lot of interesting features--color screen, SD Card slot for extra memory, MP3 playback, support for higher-speed data access over CDMA (e.g., Sprint, Verizon) networks. The big question I have is how bulky this will be--I recall seeing it will be 1.5 inches thick. That's almost large enough to require a holster, something I am *extremely* uninterested in wearing.

Alexandria, Va.: Your discussion on processor speed reminds me of when I was in college in the late '70s, and everyone measured the value of their stereo system by the receiver's watts per channel... a higher rating might be useful if you were powering speakers in several rooms, but the middle of the range was probably good enough for most people (certainly in a dorm room). I guess we just assume that bigger (and pricier) is always better.

Rob Pegoraro: Precisely. And manufacturers are always happy to indulge us in that way of thinking, since the profit margins are fattest at the high end.

Virginia Beach, Va.: I loaded MGI Software's "Videowave" as an adjunct to a new webcam. When I left for the weekend, I powered down. Upon returning, my Windows 98SE would not boot and I got an ":eplorer" fault message that EXPLORER.EXE would not load. The guy at Dell told me it was likely to be a result of a lightning strike through the phone line. (The phone line NOW goes through the surge protector). I had to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch. What is the likelihood this crash resulted from faulty software or the lightning strike (if there was one)?

washingtonpost.com: Rob, just how important is having a surge protector these days? Are PCs just a vulnerable as they've always been or have manufacturers built in protections?

Rob Pegoraro: Yes, you still need a surge protector with a new PC. The power surge could, indeed, travel through the modem line and take out the modem itself. But I'm not so sure that it would screw up your system software *when the PC is powered off.* If you fry the machine while it's turned on, you'll have a forced restart, and the attendant possibility of a corrupted hard drive. I don't see how a power strike when the machine's shut down could do anything to the system software.

Washington, DC: Hi Rob. I've got a Dell Inspiron 3200, about 3 years old. Recently, when I try to connect to the Internet (through a dial-up ISP), I get the error message "Dial tone not found." I've tested the line and the dial tone is fine. The computer also seems to recognize the moden.
The Dell rep (after asking one or two questions) said the PCMCIA slots were dead. Could there be any other explanation? Its out of warranty, so a potentially expensive problem. Thanks!

Rob Pegoraro: I've never heard of PC Card slots going dead--three years isn't that long, unless somebody's been shoving peanut butter or honey into the slots. (You're using a PC Card modem, I take it?)

Washington, D.C.: What's the battery life like on that new Treo?

Rob Pegoraro: I generally liked it. Two days of moderate to heavy use would pretty much kill the battery, but if I didn't keep the phone parked on the data network full time I could do a little better. It was much better than on the first Treo phone I tried (Handspring says it rewrote the software to manager power consumption better.)

Arlington, Va.: Gateway seems to have launched a new round of ads with its newer, flat-screen computer, which it pits squarely against Apple. Why do you think they are doing this and do you think Gateway has a chance to steal marketshare from Apple?

washingtonpost.com: And Rob, any plans to review the new Gateway PC?

Rob Pegoraro: I really don't know what Gateway is trying to accomplish with those ads at all. The Profile 4 is no competition to the iMac in the style/elegance department, and even in features it doesn't match up that well (only a CD-ROM drive in the entry-level model? no DVD-recording capability at all)? The guy I talked to at Veritest--remember, the company that conducted those comparison tests--couldn't figure out why Gateway didn't want to "go negative" against Dell, which has been eating Gateway's lunch for the past few years.

I've thought of reviewing the machine, but we're getting close to the annual home-computer roundup--it might better be left for that round of reviews. Also of note: Not a single reader has asked me if the Profile 4 is worth getting.

Falls Church, Va.: Had a chance to play around with the Mozilla 1.1 upgrade yet? What're your thoughts?

Rob Pegoraro: I've installed it on three machines so far (Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 2000). I like it on the first and last machines, but on the Windows 2000 box--the one I'm using right now--it kept crashing every time I opened a new browser tab. I went through a couple of rounds of installs and uninstalls and decided I didn't have time to figure this out. So I'm at 1.0 for now... I will try again at some point, or sooner if anybody's seen this same problem and can suggest a solution.

wiredog: re:surge protectors.

At my previous job, a few years ago, a 10KVa power line shorted into the local loop. All the systems on surge protectors, even the Wal-Mart-good-for-one-zap-only protectors, survived. The others caught fire. Anyone who doesn't use surge protectors (and firewalls) is a fool.

Rob Pegoraro: "caught fire"? Hope you got some good before-and-after pictures for the insurance company...

College Park, Md.: For the DAT seeker: I've owned several Sony D8 machines and although I am not much of a Sony fan anymore they did manage to get these machines done right. Backlit LCD panel, incredibly long record times (over 4 hours on a single tape) and a reliable tape transport that has only jammed when I was stupid enough not to let the eject cycle complete. They are small, run off sealed packs, NiMH or alkaline AA's (so you're never without ready access to power even in the third world) as well as a wall wart and digital inputs and outputs. The design hasn't changed in years which is a pro, not a con. Why tamper when you did it right to begin with?

Downside - no built-in mike and the leatherette cover is just about the most useless case I have ever come across.

Rob Pegoraro: Some DAT-buying advice for Alexandria:

Washington, DC: How much is a decent handheld running for these days? (I need something that I can use to surf the net)

Rob Pegoraro: How do you want to surf the Web? If you want to do that wirelessly, it's going to cost a lot--not so much in initial hardware but in monthly service chargs. Are you *sure* you need that?

Otherwise, you can get a good, basic, color-screen, Palm-compatible handheld for under $300--the Handspring Treo 90, the Palm m130 (even with its comparatively weak color capability) or any of Sony's lower-end Clies. If you only need black-and-white screens, you can get the cost down to $150-$200.

RE: Inspiron 3200: Thanks Rob! Yes, its a PC-Card modem. I actually have two modems and have tried them both with the same result. Am I missing a software glitch I could have overlooked? I haven't changed anything and I've reinstalled the drivers...

Rob Pegoraro: If you tried two modems and both didn't work, then the problem is either the PC Card slot, as Dell suggested... or it's the phone line itself. Have you tried dialing from another location? If that doesn't work, my condolences; I'd think you *are* hosed.

DC: Thanks for the clarity on CPUs. Now what about video cards? Which is the best at the top end? Nvidia or ATI?

Rob Pegoraro: Hard to say, but I think both nVidia and ATI would be near the top. They have both been pretty competitive with each other over the last year. Last I checked with the game reviewers I use, they had better things to say about nVidia's GeForce chipsets--but that was a few months back, and ATI has come out with some decent hardware of its own.

Bottom line: Get an AGP video card from either manufacturer with at least 32 megabytes of memory, and you'll be in worlds better shape (at least for gaming, unless you're using Mac OS X Jaguar) than anybody with graphics circuitry integrated into the motherboard.

Alexandria, Va.: I've had my cable modem for a year and a half. Should I worry about the hardware getting outdated? Just wondering if there are newer modems out there that I could request from my ISP. No, haven't noticed any performance problems with the modem.

Rob Pegoraro: Nope, you should be fine. You have some computing hardware that actually works as designed--leave it alone!

Bethesda, Md.: I want to dump my land-line phone service altogether, but I stumbled across a major reason what I can't -- the home security system I use needs a land-line to summon police in case of a break in. Any hopes that security companies will help us break the ties to land lines?

Rob Pegoraro: I haven't looked into this--good question. My hunch is that the the security system vendors don't want these emergency calls to run into a "network busy" error or get dropped halfway through. When cell phone networks are reliable enough to cover this function--then we'll really have something. (Or, I dunno, maybe they could use some other chunk of the spectrum.)

Silver Spring, MD: I'm trying to save money so I'm not ready to splurge on DSL or a Cable modem (or a second phone line), but I'm finding I miss a lot of calls while online. So, I've started checking out those web-based "while-you're-online" answering services and the Emerson Switchboard gizmo. Any advice on what works best? Me and my wallet thank you.

Rob Pegoraro: I've had DSL at home for a while and can't really make an informed recommendation here--but I invite other folks who can to chime in. (Bear in mind that all of these services require you get "caller ID on hold" service from the phone company, which will cost a few bucks a month.)

If your PC is relatively new, you might be able to get a downloadable upgrade to bring the modem up to the new v.92 standard, which (when used with a compatible ISP) supports this feature without any extra hardware or services: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1699-2002Aug10.html

Arlington, Virginia: Hey Rob - I'm pleased to see that prices constantly fall in the desktop PC market, since I'm not the kind of person who normally runs out and upgrades his computer. What still keeps me out of the store is a fear that I'll be the guy who buys a computer just BEFORE Intel, AMD or some other chipmaker designs the ueber-chip that wipes out all the rest... and I'll be there with the dregs from the previous coffee pot, metaphorically speaking. Is this a groundless fear? What processor speed, memory capacity, etc., is good for the long run (ie, the next five years)?

Rob Pegoraro: Five years? I have no idea! Nobody does, really. But if you assume you'll be doing basically the same things in, say, three years that you are today, you can usually do well by buying the slower CPU in any given line of processors (say, the P 4 1.8 GHz instead of the 2.6 GHz) and applying some of the savings towards more memory, a bigger hard drive and a better video card.

I can, however, say with somewhat complete certainty (if not "absolute metaphysical certainty," in the John McLaughlin sense) that the "uber-chip" isn't coming. Chip designs involve a lot of basic tradeoffs, and nobody's about to solve them all at a price that everyday users will be able to afford anytime soon.

College Park, Md.: A comment Re: does it make a difference whether you use AMD or Intel? Well, if your cooling fan fails or your heatsink clip breaks your AMD CPU will incinerate itself and perhaps your motherboard, too whereas the Pentium chip is designed to merely slow down and not burn up. As a result I am going back to Pentiums because I've seen a lot of five dollar cooling fans fail and they shouldn't take a $200 CPU along to the grave with them when they do!

I found this out the hard way!

Rob Pegoraro: Overheating is a real risk, especially on the fastest CPUs around. But Intel's CPUs aren't immune to this problem; some Toshiba laptops had to be recalled a couple of years ago when their internal design allowed heat to build up in the wrong parts.

Another thought: Maybe a $10 fan would be worth investing in.

Boyce Virginia: USB 2.0. I installed the ADS USB Turbo card as a step to eventually connecting a faaaast CD writer. The card went in fine, the software drivers fine. But later while running Studio DV 7.13, the system locked up in editing. (USB not involved). Later, going to the ADS web site, Explorer locked up -- all lockups were so bad, I had to pull the power plug. That upset Windows ME but I did not see a choice. I removed the card, and things have been fine ever since. But... I want to make it work. The ADS tech people have not been able to suggest anything. Any experience with it?

Rob Pegoraro: No. But you've got a couple of things going against you:

1) Win Me has no native USB 2.0 support, so you're at the mercy of whatever drivers ADS provides;

2) Win Me has no real crash protection, as you have also witnessed.

3) The real kicker--Microsoft won't be providing any USB 2.0 support "native" to Windows Me, or any other version of Windows predating 2000 or XP: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/bus/USB/USB2support.asp

Did ADS say anything about driver updates down the road?

Washington, D.C.: Any word on the new TiVo series 2 DirectTivos? (Tivo/DirectTV combo boxes)?

I don't understand why the greatest invention of all time (TiVo) hasn't taken off more.

Rob Pegoraro: Here's our review (from early June): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43235-2002Jun1.html

Columbia, md: After 2.5+ years with a Handspring Visor it is time for a new PDA.

I'm thinking about the Sony PEG-T615c which seems to have the options I want...two questions:

1. Does the bundled Word/Excel software work well? I'd like to be able to go back and forth and just want to know if they play nicely...

2. Could they come up with a more horrid set of names for their PDAs?

Also, I tried a friend's Toshiba (e310?) and it seems nice, but the interface was so, well, Windows. Was it just that I only tried it for 5 minutes? DOes is get better?

Thanks!

Rob Pegoraro: I'd get a T615c myself--especially since Circuit City has cut the price to $250 while they close this model out. The sole flaw with this model is that the display renders reds somewhat closer to brown (not a deal-breaker, but it can be distracting when viewing photos).

1) It works fine for reading documents (if they're not formatted in too many weird ways) and for light editing. But it's not exactly going to turn a Palm into a word processor. (This is based on my earlier experience with this app, Documents To Go, but I haven't tried the latest version.)

2) Probably not, especially with the way they keep changing the letter/number combinations (from N610 to T615 to SJ30).

You are quite correct that the Toshiba e310's interface is "so, well, Windows." Unfortunately, it doesn't get better--nor will it until somebody at Microsoft realizes that miniaturizing a desktop interface to use on a palm-sized screen is just A Bad Idea and should not even be attempted.

2)

Arlington, Va.: I'm starting to considering jumping into the whole widescreen HDTV pool now that prices seem to have become more reasonable. Do you expect prices to keep on dropping? Any tips on what to avoid or be especially on the lookout for? I have a conventional Toshiba 32 incher at the moment.

Rob Pegoraro: Prices will keep on dropping on HDTV monitors; the manufacturers appear to have gotten their arms around the problem of making this hardware more efficient. What is not at all clear is what sort of fair-use access you'll have to record shows off of that HDTV and how much an HDTV tuner will cost. The industry has done an utterly horrible job of answering those two questions so far.

Bethesda, Md.: I don't know about Windows, but the articles I've read agree that performance in OS X depends a lot on having a ton of memory. At this point memory is getting cheap enough that users could just max out at 1.5G, I guess.

Rob Pegoraro: No, Windows XP eats memory for breakfast too. One of my contributors just bumped his machine from 256 to 512 megabytes of RAM, and swears it runs like a new computer.

Silver Spring, Md.: How's customer satisfaction with the iMac these days? The product has been out long enough, it seems, that any problems with it would be getting reported to friendly personal tech columnists such as yourself. What's the scoop?

Rob Pegoraro: It seems to be doing pretty well. The only real hardware flaws I've seen sustained reports about concern the flat-panel screenw, which on some small number of machines is rotated slightly to the left or right. And from what I've heard, Apple is fixing those problems under warranty promptly.

DC: Do you think Apple is trying to turn the iPod into a PDA? First it was addresses, and now they are talking about this iCalendar thing.... I'm wondering where they're going with it.

Rob Pegoraro: Me too. There's no efficient way to enter data except when you're at the computer, but as a read-only device it keeps getting more and more capabilities added to it. (Which would explain why Apple equipped it with a processor, display and operating system that were all overkill for the job of managing and playing MP3 files.)

Boyce Virginia: #1 - USB 2.0. No, ADS acted surprised that I had problems, and they had no drivers to download, but you have hit on a real second problem.

#2 - The reason I was running Windows ME is that after running Windows XP for 9 months and being very satisfied, the CD/RW drive stopped reading and writing. When I followed up with the CSP contract that I got with the computer, they said they would not touch it until I went back to ME. And of course that meant a TOTAL SYSTEM RESTORE. And of course the drive was bad under ME just like it was under XP. The bad CD/RW came with the original computer which had Windows ME at the time. I can accept hardware gotchas, but it never occurred to me that there was also an Operating System Gotcha. i.e. I never purchased a maintenance contract for Windows XP. Is this policy standard?

Rob Pegoraro: 1) Don't the manufacturers *always* act surprised when you report a problem? :)

2) The contract provision you describe is ridiculous, if not Kafkaesque, but also fairly common. (Now if the people providing this so-called service wanted to save both time and money--including their own--they would have just shipped you a new CD-RW drive. This isn't a difficult part to replace on a desktop, and the cost of a new drive would be much less than the cost of paying to have the entire PC shipped back and forth and analyzed.)

Arlington, VA: Microsoft has come under a lot of fire recently for supposed holes in its Passport tools. Do you use Passport and do you have advice for consumers looking to store their account information in one spot?

Rob Pegoraro: I only have a Passport account because I opened a Hotmail/MSN Messenger account. I don't use it for any other purposes and I don't recommend that anybody else do so. Microsoft's track record with data security is way, way too bad for me to want to trust them with any significant chunk of my online identity.

Alexandria, Va.: What's the best firewall software for Mac OS?

Rob Pegoraro: Mac OS X 10.1 includes a decent firewall built-in, but I don't like it as much a program called Impasse (www.glu.com, $10 shareware), which is as easy to set up but offers some additional customization options. I don't know that it's been certified to work with 10.2, however, so I'm going with the built-in software instead for now.

Rockville, MD: Rob, I'm on the lookout for a digital camera for my parents....they had been using and Olympus Stylus Epic P&S. I have a background in black and white SLR photography, but don't really know what the good digital cams are. They would like zoom capability, and lens with comparable quality of the Epic. Do you have any suggestions?

Rob Pegoraro: The Epic's a basic point-and-shoot camera, which means most digital cameras will have the same set of options, lens quality and even size/weight. (Esp. if you get an Olympus digicam.) If your folks haven't printed out an 8x10 anytime recently, a camera with a 3x optical zoom and 2.0 megapixels of resolution should do fine for them.

[Can we get a link to our last round of digital-camera reviews?]

Washington, DC: Hi Rob! I seem to be having terrible luck with cell phones. I use Sprint and have had several of their Samsung phones, all of which seem to become completely useless after a few months. I'm losing signal constantly on my Samsung SCH-6100. I've got to believe its the phone because friends with Sprint get signal in the same places I do not. Sprint tech people say nothing's wrong with the phone? Any advice on what could be wrong? or what phone I should buy next? thanks!

Rob Pegoraro: What could be wrong? Really, anything--a cell phone is, at heart, a miniaturized computer with some radio-frequency circuitry on the inside. So *lots* of things can go awry. If you can spot the phone losing a signal outside (or inside!) a Sprint store, drag the manager over to look at what's going on. Remember the basic math of the wireless industry: Even if Sprint gives you a new phone, it will be much cheaper for the company than the cost of getting a new customer to replace you.

Arlington, VA: Your DAT questioner might be better off with MiniDisc instead. Sony finally seems to be pushing the format in the US for web music use. A portable MD recorder would certainly be able to record street sounds and have plenty of other applications too.

Rob Pegoraro: One other answer on that DAT question. (One of my contributors, who's a bit of an audio geek, also e-mailed to suggest going shopping on eBay.)

Rob Pegoraro: We've now run about 15 minutes over, so it's time for me to type off into the sunset. Thanks for all the questions; if I missed yours, drop me a note at rob@twp.com.

- R

washingtonpost.com: Here's the link to the digital camera reviews that ran over the summer.

washingtonpost.com: Thanks Rob, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Check back in two weeks for the next Fast Forward online.

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