What would a show report by Thomas Pabst be if there wasn't at least one party for him to talk about? After my AMD-appointment I had to give an interview and after that I had the pleasure to meet with Dr. Roloff from the 'Deutsche Messe AG', the organizer of CeBIT. The next thing was finally our press registration and then there wasn't enough time to see VIA anymore. Unfortunately my plan was to leave Hannover on Friday morning, so that all the other reports will have to come from the other editors of Tom's Hardware who stayed in Hannover.

Fortunately Kai Schmerer from ZD's German PC Professionell had invited almost all the important press people with the one exception of Mike Magee from The Register, who was sadly missed by most of us. I arrived there after an excellent meal that I had enjoyed at, in my humble opinion, the best restaurant of Hannover, a Spanish restaurant by the name 'El Pais'. The ZD-party was in a rather funky place called 'Capitol' and in my eyes it was a full success.

From left to right: Andreas Stiller (c't), Uwe Scheffel (Tom's Hardware), Hermann Eiden (Tom's Hardware), Kai Schmerer (PC-Professionell) and the one guy that's hardly on the picture with the disgusting beer bottle in his hand is .... well, guess! Ed Henning had taken this picture and you can see that, with his long press-experience, he knows to handle a camera a lot better than Uwe Scheffel, who took the next one:

From left to right: Christian Ehmer (IBM), Andreas Stiller (c't), Ed Henning (PC Magazine UK), Hermann Eiden (Tom's), Kai Schmerer (PC Professionell).

A little later we were joined by half of Intel's marketing and sales department and had a really good time taking the p**s of each other. The party finished at 2:30 AM, but most of us went to another place until 5 AM. Only Daniel (Chip-Magazine, Germany) and I ended up in another bar that we left around 7 AM. He decided to get ready for the next day of CeBIT and I had to catch my plane home.

<summary=VIA has almost all reasons to be happy. Besides the fight with Intel VIA has become very successful. The latest addition to VIA's product-portfolio is the Cyrix III processor.>