29-11-2012, 12:03 AM
Well said, both of you 
Some people are happy to play the game of constant upgrades - be it with their computers, but also their cars and other "consumer durables". Other people, myself included, prefer to avoid the waste of all that. A 10 year old computer today is very viable for many people - rather more so than a 10 year old computer was 10 years ago. If that makes sense...
A 10 year old computer today will probably be a P4, and the motherboards of those times would normally go to 3.06GHz (limited by the 533MHz FSB), and would accept 2MB of RAM. Such a machine will run XP or 2000 really well, and both of those OSs are perfectly usable today. Yes, support for XP is due to finish at the end of 2014, but that just means Microsoft won't release new updates. All the previous updates will be available. Clearly, such a machine gives you full access to multi-media via the internet if you want.
Meanwhile, go back 10 years and consider a 10 year old computer. In 1992, what did we have? The 486 - and in 1992 it had made it up to 66MHz. Typically 16MB or 32MB of RAM. Motherboards had ISA slots, perhaps with VLB. The PCI bus hadn't arrived yet. If you were lucky, you might have had a sound card. Had CD-ROM drives been invented by this point? The idea of the multi-media PC was still forming at this stage... Windows 3.1 was an absolute pain to make work, sitting on top of DOS, of course.
All this makes you wander where we'll be in 10 years time. Will computers seem faster? Probably not by much - software is so complex and bloated now, and very poorly coded. A lot of Windows 95 was hand-coded assembler, according to Microsoft, and actually ran pretty well. My first Win 95 machine was a 486, and provided you had at least 8MB of RAM, it was fairly usable. Going to 16MB made a useful difference. That was in 1996. When Win 98 came out, Microsoft had a winner - Win Me was a step backwards. But of course, the NT kernel was always going to be the way forward. Today we forget what it was like to not have a fully pre-emptive multitasking environment on our desktop machines - 20 years ago that was reserved for main-frame computers!
My computer "fleet" is P4 or earlier. Mostly rescued from skips or inherited from relatives or picked up second-hand. I get a certain amount of satisfaction from tuning them to work well, and especially from doing hardware repairs on old motherboards or the like. It does require a certain amount of knowledge, of course, and I spent many years learning it all while doing IT support as a day job - when I was happy to let my boss spend the big money on new toys while buying his old stuff from him - let others be "early adopters"
Incidentally, as a result of this, I have boxes full of assorted hardware - I must have nearly 50 3Com 3C5X9 network cards! If anyone needs these, or AGP graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc, let me know as I might be able to help out.
My car is relatively young at just 12 years old! I drive a lot of new cars at work, and feel no need to change. It might be different if I drove 100s of miles a week for a living, but for now, I have no plans to change it until it gets expensive. It's still on the original clutch, exhaust and battery. The only unscheduled maintenance was a water pump. Not bad for a Ford - a lot, lot better than the German cars I'd had previously...
Some people are happy to play the game of constant upgrades - be it with their computers, but also their cars and other "consumer durables". Other people, myself included, prefer to avoid the waste of all that. A 10 year old computer today is very viable for many people - rather more so than a 10 year old computer was 10 years ago. If that makes sense...
A 10 year old computer today will probably be a P4, and the motherboards of those times would normally go to 3.06GHz (limited by the 533MHz FSB), and would accept 2MB of RAM. Such a machine will run XP or 2000 really well, and both of those OSs are perfectly usable today. Yes, support for XP is due to finish at the end of 2014, but that just means Microsoft won't release new updates. All the previous updates will be available. Clearly, such a machine gives you full access to multi-media via the internet if you want.
Meanwhile, go back 10 years and consider a 10 year old computer. In 1992, what did we have? The 486 - and in 1992 it had made it up to 66MHz. Typically 16MB or 32MB of RAM. Motherboards had ISA slots, perhaps with VLB. The PCI bus hadn't arrived yet. If you were lucky, you might have had a sound card. Had CD-ROM drives been invented by this point? The idea of the multi-media PC was still forming at this stage... Windows 3.1 was an absolute pain to make work, sitting on top of DOS, of course.
All this makes you wander where we'll be in 10 years time. Will computers seem faster? Probably not by much - software is so complex and bloated now, and very poorly coded. A lot of Windows 95 was hand-coded assembler, according to Microsoft, and actually ran pretty well. My first Win 95 machine was a 486, and provided you had at least 8MB of RAM, it was fairly usable. Going to 16MB made a useful difference. That was in 1996. When Win 98 came out, Microsoft had a winner - Win Me was a step backwards. But of course, the NT kernel was always going to be the way forward. Today we forget what it was like to not have a fully pre-emptive multitasking environment on our desktop machines - 20 years ago that was reserved for main-frame computers!
My computer "fleet" is P4 or earlier. Mostly rescued from skips or inherited from relatives or picked up second-hand. I get a certain amount of satisfaction from tuning them to work well, and especially from doing hardware repairs on old motherboards or the like. It does require a certain amount of knowledge, of course, and I spent many years learning it all while doing IT support as a day job - when I was happy to let my boss spend the big money on new toys while buying his old stuff from him - let others be "early adopters"
Incidentally, as a result of this, I have boxes full of assorted hardware - I must have nearly 50 3Com 3C5X9 network cards! If anyone needs these, or AGP graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc, let me know as I might be able to help out.
My car is relatively young at just 12 years old! I drive a lot of new cars at work, and feel no need to change. It might be different if I drove 100s of miles a week for a living, but for now, I have no plans to change it until it gets expensive. It's still on the original clutch, exhaust and battery. The only unscheduled maintenance was a water pump. Not bad for a Ford - a lot, lot better than the German cars I'd had previously...
