4 Computers

Here are summaries of some recent Computing product reviews. Each product is rated on a scale of one to four, with one computer indicating poor and four indicating excellent:Disk Manager-Mac, for Mac Plus, SE, SE-30, II, LC or Classic with System 5 or later software. $69.95. From Ontrack Computer Systems, 6321 Bury Drive, Minneapolis, Minn. 55346. (800) 752-1333.The Norton Desktop for Windows, for PC or compatible running Windows 3.0 in Standard or Enhanced mode and hard disk. $149. From Symantec Corp.

Anne Arundel Justices dismiss 2002 murder case With a single-line order that offered no insight into their reasoning, the Supreme Court on Monday dismissed the case of Leeander Jerome Blake, who had been charged with carjacking and fatally shooting Straughan Lee Griffin as Griffin was unloading his sport utility vehicle in front of his Annapolis home in September 2002. In throwing out the prosecution's appeal of whether it could use an allegedly incriminating statement from the then-17-year-old Blake after he had requested, then waived, his right to an attorney, the nation's highest court passed on an opportunity to clarify one of the so-called Miranda warnings that govern police interrogations.

THERE ISN'T another gadget that comes with more alphabet soup than a computer. By that I mean the tangle of abbreviations and acronyms that techies were born knowing but the rest of us have to wade through when we buy a PC or fix one. Lately I've been hearing questions from buyers perplexed by the alphabet soup of computer memory. They see PC's advertised with SDRAM, DDR RAM, RDRAM, SIMMs, DIMMs, RIMMs and other terms that make no sense at all. One reason is that memory chips - which were fairly standard for a couple of years - have branched off in different directions.

Parents and students lobbied county school board members last night for everything from new teachers to new schools during the first of a series of budget hearings on Superintendent Carol S. Parham's proposed $516 million budget.About 200 people attended the hearing in the auditorium of Old Mill High School in Millersville. Mostly, they supported Parham's spending plan for next school year, which includes a raise for teachers and 180 new teaching positions.They urged the board to approve programs aimed at increasing the number of computers in classrooms and reducing first-grade classes.

Economists are pleased at the latest export figures, which show American-made goods doing increasingly well in world markets. Instead of the negative growth that greeted the start of the Eighties, U.S. exports are booming, driving a steady upcurve on analysts' charts. What is especially encouraging is the fact that the big growth has come in manufactured goods: aircraft, up 99.4 percent since 1986; electrical machinery, up 133.1 percent; cars and trucks, up 61.4 percent; computers and office machines, up 69.5 percent; and small manufactured goods, up 145.9 percent.

In an attempt to get every school onto the same technological page, the Howard County school system is phasing in a plan to get rid of about 4,000 computers, servers and other types of technology deemed behind current standards. The department, under an agreement with Apple Financial Services of Austin, Texas, will pay $1.6 million a year to lease new equipment -- including desktop and laptop computers and up-to-date operating systems -- and at the end of four years will have the opportunity to purchase each computer for a dollar.

ISmart, the Elkridge company that persuaded the Anne Arundel board of education to rebid a major computer contract with the school system, wants the board to dismiss the contract winner's request to uphold the contract. The low bidder for the multiyear contract worth more than $20 million argues that GTSI - the school system's first choice - is trying to "ambush" the board and ISmart, and that it doesn't have standing to demand a reconsideration. ISmart's request, filed Monday with the board, is the latest legal maneuver in a dispute over a contract to provide thousands of computers to county schools as part of the "Technology Refresh" program to upgrade technological capabilities throughout the school system.