To solve this problem, Intel and Microsoft developed the Plug and Play (PnP) specification. The introduction of PnP and the PCI slot was meant to solve these upgrade problems. Like any emerging PC technology, PnP went through a painful period of maturity. PnP was jokingly called "Plug and Pray" by many early users. This is because peripheral manufacturers had to change their products to meet the PnP specs. And BIOS manufacturers such as AMI, Award, and Phoenix had to do the same. Lastly, the operating system itself had to be made PnP aware. If these three components do not work together, then PnP as a whole will not function correctly.

Microsoft's Windows 95 (released on August 25, 1995) was the first OS to support PnP. It took awhile before the peripheral and BIOS makers caught up, but they eventually did. But even today, in some rare configuration, adding a PnP card to your PC requires some troubleshooting. Especially if you have multiple PnP devices in your system already. But overall, PnP today really works the way it's suppose to.

Besides PnP, a standard for power management was also introduced. It was called APM (Advanced Power Management). This was really aimed at the rapidly growing notebook segment. But APM eventually made its way to the desktop PC as well. APM worked well to control simple things like spinning down the HDD when it's not in use or decreasing the processor speed when it's idle. But APM didn't have the ability to manage power on external devices, such as modem, printer, scanner, etc. And with the introduction of USB, many new devices will now be external.

So is it very difficult to convert CD music tracks to MP3 files? Not at all. But remember that MP3 encoding and decoding is very processor intensive. Unless you have a great deal of patience, I'd recommend a system with at least a Pentium II/266 CPU. And you'd need a large hard drive, which really isn't a problem since today's average HDD is at least 2.5GB. For reference, it takes roughly 30 minutes for a Pentium II/333 to convert a 45MB WAV (which is a four minute and 30 second song) file to a 4.5MB MP3 file.

Once you have the proper hardware, you'll need to get some software utilities to make the conversion from CD audio track to MP3. You cannot convert an audio track directly to MP3. You must first convert the track to a WAV file. This is also known as "ripping" a track. MP3 has a complete list of CD rippers. I personally use WinDAC32, which is shareware, but it has a nice easy-to-use interface. Be aware that some older IDE CD-ROM drives (especially those from Mitsumi) may not allow you to rip music tracks.

Depending on the speed of your DVD/CD-ROM drive, ripping a single track shouldn't take more than two to three minutes. The resulting WAV file will take up about 45-50MB for an average four minute song. Once you have ripped all the tracks to WAV files, it's now time to convert them to MP3. Again, MP3.COM has a complete list of MP3 encoders you can download. If you're creating a lot of MP3 files, be sure to get an encoder that supports batch processing mode. In other words, you just feed the encoder a list of WAV files and it'll automatically convert them all the MP3. This way, you don't have to sit in front of your system all day long.

When encoding a WAV file to MP3, there's a couple of options you can pick. The most important option is the final bitrate of the MP3 file. This can vary from 32K bits/sec to 320K bits/sec. Which bitrate you should choose depends on how large the resulting MP3 you want. Of course, selecting a lower bitrate will affect the sound quality. I usually choose 128K bits/sec, which will give me an MP3 file of about 4.5MB in size with close to CD sound quality. After trying various GUI encoders, I now use Blade Encoder, which is a small, freeware (78K) command line DOS based encoder. It's simple and fast and it works great in batch mode. Sometimes simplicity is better...

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440GX AGPset - The only difference between the 440GX and the current 440BX is the 440GX will be able to address up to 2GB of memory (440BX can only do 1GB). The 440GX will be able to support both the slot 1 and slot 2 architecture. Since the 440GX will only support up to two Xeon processor, this AGPset is intended for highend workstations and mid-range servers. All the features of the 440BX (100MHz FSB support, USB, UltraDMA/33, AGP 2x, etc) will be present on the 440GX. Click here to view the 440GX specs on Intel's website.

• 440NX PCIset - Notice the 450NX is classified as a PCIset instead of an AGPset. This is because the 450NX does not support the AGP slot. Intel intentionally left out AGP support because the 450NX is meant for an enterprise server system board. Another interesting aspect of the 450NX is that it only supports EDO memory. The 450NX can address up to 8GB of main memory. Intel recently annouced an errata for the 450NX and their Xeon processor. Due to this errata, four way Xeon CPU systems will be delayed a couple of weeks. Intel will be releasing a software fix for this problem. 

  Both the 440GX and 450NX represent Intel's first generation Xeon/slot 2 chipset. As expected, there's not too many new features in these two chipsets. But the second and third generation slot 2 chipsets will probably have AGP Pro (AGP 4x), Firewire, and RDRAM (RAMBUS) support. Lastly, the front side bus (FSB) between the processor and memory may be increased to 133MHz.

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