Company Chips In to Help Fulfill Disabled Boy’s High-Speed Wish

The keys to the Magic Kingdom were his for the asking, but Peter Valeo had other worlds to conquer.

When the charitable Starlight Foundation offered to grant the paraplegic 12-year-old’s fondest wish--a visit to Walt Disney World, perhaps?--Pete instead chose a chip: Intel Corp.’s new Pentium Pro microprocessor and all the hardware he could imagine.

Intel agreed, donating a $10,000 system that would make any cyberfreak salivate. The Santa Clara, Calif., company also made Peter a member of an elite user group that is testing the chip for flaws.

“It’s great,” Pete said Wednesday. “It is so fast compared to my other one, it is like light speed.”

The sixth-grader, paralyzed from his midsection down since December by transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord sheath, spends two to three hours a day playing games such as Doom, Myst and Mortal Kombat III, writing e-mail and reading. His injury is not considered life-threatening.

The Los Angeles foundation grants wishes to severely ill children.

Intel says Pete’s biweekly performance reports may help it avoid the embarrassment and multimillion-dollar replacement costs it suffered last year after users detected calculating flaws in the Pentium chip, the Pentium Pro’s predecessor.

Pentium Pro became commercially available earlier this month. It is expected to become common in home PCs in two or three years.