No Need to Upgrade that PC? 502
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post (free reg.) has an interesting article about a developing trend in the computer retail business: People aren't buying new PCs. Why? Well, no suprise to those who read this, but grandma and Joe Sixpack don't need a screaming new P4 to surf the net and write letters. Are they just figuring this out?"
Re:You know what that means... (Score:3, Informative)
As foretold... (Score:2, Informative)
Manufacturing Headlines (Score:5, Informative)
For people to upgrade, they need to see sluggish performance. An upgraded GUI can soak tons of raw CPU power in ways that make you yearn for it (just ask the Mac folks about CPU consumption under the OS X GUI). Transparent windows, photo realistic icons, bayesian user interfaces, fully indexable content, database file system, you name it: these features can keep a P4 busy all day.
Until then, a slow pentium at home is all I need to surf the web and read e-mail.
Re:You know what that means... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, that's not how it works. Programs using shared libraries all use the same library code in memory, just as in Windows. Integration has nothing to do with this. However, if NineNine's X server is misconfigured, or if he doesn't have accelerated support for his card, then X will be slower.
Re:It IS news to the readers (Score:3, Informative)
Like, perhaps, the infamous exploding/leaking capacitors of two weeks ago?
Here? [slashdot.org]
Re:It IS news to the readers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
That all depends on the browser [mozilla.org].
Actualy my 700mhz proccessor is getting dog slow rendering many shockwave videos now, to view the the fancier artistic ones, yes there are "artistic" shockwave videos, and yes they look reaallly good, I have to turn the quality setting in shockwave down to medium or even low!
Ick.
Re:Swinging the other way (Score:3, Informative)
Or you could just put your server in another room.
Maybe I'm just cheap...but why buy a new machine? (Score:2, Informative)
As for upgrading my PC or buying a new one, I've never had a compelling need to buy a newer/faster Windoze machine. My Pentium II/266 has over 300MB of RAM, an upgraded IDE controller, second hard drive, 8MB (upgraded from 4MB) VRAM and runs all the programs I need like a champ. The only thing I can't do is run games that require more than 8MB of VRAM. And if I wanted to, I would just by a new video card instead of a new computer. Why would I buy a new machine? My serious work and game playing I do on my 333MHz iMac or my 400MHz G4 tower. And eventually instead of buying a new G4 Tower, I will simply buy a processor upgrade card-or, wife permitting, a DUAL G4! (drool!) processor upgrade card- and a faster video card-maybe in two years.
Well, to be truthful, I will upgrade to the new processor as soon as my wife....uh..our finances allow.
Diminishing Marginal Utility.... (Score:2, Informative)
For example, I am currently typing this on my P4 2.2GHz workstation. If I replace the CPU with a P4 2.4GHz, the utility that I gain will be marginal (ie: hardly any difference). In any case, I have to argue that it is all relative!
I have a P3 1.3GHz laptop, and another P3 450MHz workstation, and for me to use those as my main workstation is just not possible anymore. Why? Well, believe it or not, there is a noticeable speed difference with all the machines - even for basic word processing and internet browsing. Sure there are architectural differences in terms of RAM, HD, etc, but the fact remains that there is a speed difference.
Why is that important? Computers are used more than just for word processing and internet browsing. Playing games, watching movies, listening to music all require a decent amount of resources for the experience to be enjoyable. You're kidding yourself if you can really play (and more importantly enjoy) UT2K3 on anything less than P3 1GHz and less than a GF2. Don't tell me that you're getting 60fps, max details, 32-bit colour, at 1280x1024 because you're not.
Nonetheless, we have to remember that CPU speeds are relative. The gaming industry is driving CPU speeds a lot more than say Microsoft is with productivity applications. But to say that you're 'happy' with your less than 1GHz machine with today's applications and games is kidding yourself a lot more than you realize. You'll never want to use a 'slow' machine as your main workstation when you've used something 'fast'. It's human nature after all.
memory (Score:3, Informative)
my mother's machine starting getting slower even though she only used it for email and surfing. The software had been upgraded and 32M wasn't enough. So I added 256M of memory for $50 et voila: happy mother. Bill isn't happy. Monkey-man isn't happy. But mom is doing just fine.
Re:You know what that means... (Score:3, Informative)
Then you also have drop shadows for window text, multiple workspaces (seems to be standard with every wm nowadays), window snapping and/or edge resistance (which I STILL wish Windows would include by default), and it only consumes a few hundred kbytes of RAM, leaving almost all of a system's resources available to applications.
Re:It IS news to the readers (Score:3, Informative)
No, I don't work for either of these places, but as a purveyor of yesterday's hardware on the cheap, I feel obligated to pass on the places I have good experiences with.
Re:Manufacturing Headlines (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I am one of the Mac folk you speak of and I can say that it really doesn't slow things down much. The two big factors which caused people to perceive a slowdown were increased memory usage and a non-optimized operating system.
Once you up your memory and upgrade to a more recent build of MacOS X (the most recent is 10.2.2), you find that it is pretty much as quick as the MacOSs that came before it. It is slower in some tasks and quicker in others, but overall there really isn't any performance degradation. In fact I would say that performance has actually gone up a bit, simply due to the fact that applications multitask much more smoothly. Another reason performance is up is that I never have to start up my computer anymore, I just leave it running 24/7. It uses almost no power when sleeping and starts up in a few seconds. That is certainly quicker than having to start up my computer every day, or to restart it when there is trouble with a piece of software.
Win95 B (Score:2, Informative)
Windows 95 version B was an OEM only version of win95 that was released as a stopgap measure until 98 came out. you could only get it on a new computer. It fixed a lot of win95 bugs at the same time as adding a couple things...those are...
You can download a PATCH from M$ for it that can give it LIMITED USB support. Most hardware manufacturers that make USB devices say 98 or higher because of the problems with the 95 version. Also, it could not support more than 1 USB device very easily. (In fact, if you install an Iomega Zip drive the driver install tells you that you will not be able to use any other USB devices on the port until you uninstall the iomega stuff).
Hopefully this helps you.
The new upgrade trend. (Score:4, Informative)
1. Memory upgrades. You'll be amazed that many computer built before 2000 sport 64 MB of RAM at most. Given many of them use 168-pin DIMM's, they could be easily upgrade the RAM to 256 MB or well beyond that for a very reasonable price. And the benefits are immediate: since the need to use the hard drive as virtual memory is very low with computer that have memory upgrades, performance increases of 70 to 100 percent are not out of the question, not to mention substantially fewer system crashes, too.
2. Hard drive upgrades. The switch to a 7200 RPM drive makes reading and writing data on a hard drive much faster. People shouldn't worry about ATA-66 or ATA-100 hard drives working on motherboards with ATA-33 connections, since they should be compatible in general. Sure, you won't get the full benefit of the ATA-66/100 data rate, but it would probably be much better than the old hard drive.
3. Graphics card upgrades. Many older systems use old technology AGP slot graphics cards that are woefully underpowered to handle many of today's multimedia tasks. Cards such as the ATI Radeon 7000 or card that use the nVidia GeForce4 MX420 CPU of course won't offer cutting edge 3-D performance, but they're very reasonably priced and are still vastly better than the original cards.
4. CPU upgrades. Don't laugh--if you have a motherboard that uses Slot 1 or Socket 370, there are now upgrades that can tremendously increase the speed of the computer. Powerleap is now selling CPU upgrades for Slot 1 and Socket 370 that uses the Tualatin-core Celeron and Pentium III CPU's running at well beyond 1 GHz CPU clock speed.
Very likely, most people will spring for the memory upgrade first, since it's the cheapest solution and the one that has the most immediate benefits for all programs.
Re:Erm windows? (Score:2, Informative)
Bottom line. Go to www.tweakhound.com Tweak XP and trade GUI effects for speed and less useage of graphics memory. Save said graphics memory for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Of course, if you're running a desktop, you have no excuse not to run Linux and install Unreal Tournament 2003 (Linux installer on the 3rd disk) and frag away!
Re:what about macs? (Score:3, Informative)
Drive/CPU/graphics card upgrade compatibility databases, and very detailed hardware upgrade and review articles with benchmarks are the real gems here. Front page has daily news updates for upgraders. The forums are good, but closed to newcomers.
Re:You know what that means... (Score:3, Informative)
Personally I use a combination of ROX [slashdot.org] for the desktop and IceWM [icewm.org] for the window-manager, both of which work just as fast on my laptop (an ancient P120) as on my desktop - in a word, near instantaneous. They're worth checking out if you like the idea of a desktop environment but don't like the associated crud that comes with GNOME and KDE. (The fact that ROX whips Konq or Nautilus in the file-management stakes is a pretty big reason too, of course :)
As far as X's stability goes, I've only ever seen that keyboard/mouse lock-up situation twice in nearly five years of using linux, so I really can't agree. For me, X has been rock-solid, and even the standard apps I use with X tend to be incredibly stable. Hell, I reckon that the "unstable" GIMP is just about as stable as certain commercial COREL or Adobe products :)
I think the main reason why linux *seems* slower from an end-user perspective is because of KDE (which gets installed as default by just about every distro these days). The first thing the user sees is a rather ugly, unreponsive piece of memory-hogging bloat-ware that has all the features he/she doesn't need (aa text, alpha-blended menus, etc) turned on to make it even slower. "What could be easier than opening the file-manager to find a file", the naive user thinks ... whooops! Guess which application takes half a minute to open a directory!
(alright - I got fairly carried away there, I know KDE isn't that bad. But if I knew nothing about the open-source software concept or underlying OS stability, didn't care about pirating software, and was presented with a choice between Windows or KDE ... well, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be the one with the penguin on the front :)