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The Great PC Race of 2002
Redland Oaks Elementary Gets PC

by
Larry Grosskopf

May 2003

Larry Grosskopf is a Clinical Psychologist at the San Antonio State Hospital, with a love for learning and a strong interest in computers. Larry and his wife, Marta, are raising two wonderful children, Zoé is now 10 and Jackson is eight.

If you have been a member of Alamo PC Organization for at least a couple of years, you may recall my first article on this event - a race to build a PC - in the year 2000. It was in the April 2001 PC Alamode. Unfortunately, the next year, even though I attended COMDEX, I did not get to compete in this event. After that disappointment, I hoped that it would not happen again. Well, as you may or may not know, I did make the trek to COMDEX in November of 2002. After making some effort to contact the Systemax representatives, the cosponsor, along with AMD, of the Great PC Race, prior to COMDEX, success was finally achieved and I was assured a spot in the event which consisted of 30 racers who were pitted against one another to build the fastest PC in the west.

This is a charity event and it is a competition as well, so the way I look at it, there can be no losers. Even the competitor who finishes dead last still gets to donate the computer he builds to the charity of his or her choice. My first year in this event was promising at the beginning as I led after three minutes but when I put the wrong screw into the machine and could not get it out, I ended up finishing next to last. You might say "that's not too bad," and it certainly wasn't, because I still got to donate a $3,000.00 computer system and peripherals to Fox Run Elementary School. However, I wanted to perform better the next time.

I kept telling myself I needed to practice in the days leading up to the event. Of course, as is typical for me, I ran out of time, without having practiced at all. This was the 6th Annual event and is held on the Tuesday of COMDEX week. The winner not only gets to donate the computer, but also wins $10,000.00 to be donated to their chosen charity. The second place finisher won $2,500.00 and the third place finisher $1,000.00. Each of the 30 contestants has to be a member of the Press attending COMDEX, and yours truly was proud to represent Alamo PC Organization, Inc. and PC Alamode magazine. All other participants do not walk away empty-handed, as they still get to donate the computer system and a host of peripherals to their selected school or charity organization.

Tiger Direct has sponsored the event each year I have been involved. It is a subsidiary of Systemax, the donor of the computer. The machines we built in the race were the new generation of a Systemax "Tool-less" computer, which requires no tools for assembly. The Systemax representative pointed out that the tool-less assembly allows a user to easily upgrade hard drives, floppy drives, CD and DVD-ROM's using the special plastic clips that attach to the drive bays inside the case. Inside the machine was a fast and powerful AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU with QuantiSpeed architecture. Other donors/contributions were:

Canon contributed a Multipass printer, scanner, copier combination.
NEC provided a beautiful 15-inch flat-panel Multisync monitor.
Cyber Acoustics gave a robust-sounding surround-sound speaker system.
Microsoft provided Windows XP and Office XP.
KeyStone donated learning software to be installed on the machine.
NTI donated a copy of the software program NTI Backup
Stopzilla! the Popup ad stopper software was also included, as were the Dymo LabelWriter 330, and a Belkin universal power supply.

Back to the event, the sponsors were very hospitable and did an excellent job hosting the event. For some reason, I was very nervous prior to the event, perhaps because I wanted very badly to improve over my previous performance. At any rate, before I knew it, we were ready to begin and my "helper" was very positive. Each contestant is assigned a helper, who should perhaps be called a coach instead, because he cannot help you at all, other than verbally. Once the race began, I started out slowly but soon picked up the pace and was quite successful. It was exciting, and I felt that things were going just the way I wanted them to when disaster struck. I was done and booted up the computer but got an error message. Back to the drawing board, or more correctly, the workbench. I quickly discovered that I had forgotten to connect the cable connecting the hard drive to the motherboard. As luck would have it, I had a heck of a time getting it to connect. My hands were too big for that small space, I guess. Anyway, it took an extra minute or two for me to finally plug it in. Once this was connected, I reattached the case, booted up again and discovered that I finished in 10th place.

Now, as to this year's San Antonio recipient of this awesome computer system and peripherals, the selected educational institution is Redland Oaks Elementary, an NEISD public school. Given the current state of world affairs and the kind of budget cuts that are being discussed by the legislators in Texas, who knows when or if there will be money for technology upgrades in area schools in the foreseeable future. As a representative of all Alamo PC members, I talked with Ms. Jackie Lee, Redland Oaks principal and discussed how they would use the computer.

Redland Oaks' new PC They plan on making it available to all of their teachers and classrooms for use in a variety of ways, including PowerPoint presentations, and to use with the school's computer microscope. The school's microscope is an interesting story, since it only works with Windows XP and no computers in the classrooms or school library have this operating system. The only way they have used it in the past is if Ms. Lee could lend them her personal laptop which has Windows XP on it. Now they have a great system and a wonderful teaching tool for their teachers and students to use. They purchased a cart to make the system more portable and they asked me if I would like to put it together for them. I gladly did the simple part of connecting wires and plugging things in and the end result is a very nice product. Let me interject a grateful "Thank You" to AMD, Systemax and all of the other donors for this donation of an approximate $3,000 value. This is a truly wonderful and worthwhile deed.