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October 2019 “Members Helping Members” Volume 36 Issue 07

President’s Column
Author: Andrew Cummins, President, ICON Users Group, MO

August 2019 issue, The ICON Newsletter
www.iconusersgroup.org
andrewcummins (at) yahoo.com

I saw in a store PCs being sold which boasted of incredible amounts of system memory
for their price, such as 24GB. Looking at the smaller print, that 24GB is 8GB of RAM
plus 16GB of “Optane memory.” Optane memory is just a small SSD to cache a large
HDD. It gives the PC the performance similar to an SSD for not much more than the
cost of a cheap HDD. Don’t be confused by my jargon, and don’t be fooled into thinking
Optane is system memory, or RAM. At least Optane memory does what it does well and so shouldn’t
be avoided.

I’m really excited about LED lights, but if you go out to buy high-powered LED lights, they often are
advertised with false wattages, such as 600 watts for something that actually uses 60 watts. Some-
times you can’t even find the actual wattage used on the packaging. They want you to think you’re
getting more light for your money than you’re actually getting. At least the power savings of LED
lighting versus older technology is incredible, regardless of advertised power.

If you’ve ever checked with Windows to see how large your PC hard drive is, you’ve always been
presented with a smaller number than the advertised capacity for your hard drive. Hard drive capaci-
ties are advertised with redefined terms to make them appear larger. At least it’s not a large differ-
ence between advertised and actual capacity.

When you look into it, there’s an incredible amount of misleading, if not false, advertising. It’s not just
the tech industry. Go buy a flowerpot and see if it’s really the gallon capacity advertised. It’s almost
certainly smaller. At least pots are often sold by inches in diameter, a less abused measure of pot
size.

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