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No Need to Upgrade that PC?
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?"
Hahaha... That's pretty funny. Especially considering W2K runs great on my old P 350, but Redhat makes the hard drive spin ad infinitum and opening a window in KDE or Gnome is a major undertaking. I actually can't run a Linux with a GUI on any of my machines. It's too damn slow. But, I can run W2K on any of 'em. Funny, huh?
This is a trend that has been going on now for about ten years now. The average upgrade time has been slowly moving up, from 12 months to 24 months over the last ten years IIRC. My guess is that average home computer upgrade time has moved from 2-3 years to 5-6 years (with the exception of gamers, who ofetn live on the cutting edge).
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.
"windows can share a bunch data among different programs, in linux each program needs its own copy of the data (this is just my naieve view of things, i'm not a linux hacker)."
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.
Like, perhaps, the infamous exploding/leaking capacitors of two weeks ago?
Here?
or failing hard drives?
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You could also look at underclocking Intel CPUs by running them at a lower voltage and megahertz (for example, run the 133mhz FSB CPUs at 100mhz and take the voltage down a bit). Then you can simply put a decent chunk 'o metal heat sink on there without a fan. Open up the power supply and replace the cheapie (or even spendy) but loud fan with a good low Db one. Buy 5400 RPM drives instead of 7200 RPM. Use a decent case that dampens the noise level.
Or you could just put your server in another room.
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.
Openbox has font anti-aliasing (with XFree86 4.1+), opaque window moving, and it runs like a champ on a P75 laptop of mine. You can get alpha blending using psuedo-transparent terminal emulators like aterm.
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.
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Pass on eBay, check Package 2 You and NewEgg for cheap new and refurbished hardware. Ever since Onsale @ Auction went away, I've been buying my upgrades from these guys. Usually as cheap (or cheaper) than most of the equivalents I've seen on eBay and most of it has some sort of warranty included.
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.
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I think in today's economy, the next major burst of upgrade comes in four areas:
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.
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.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Personally I use a combination of ROX for the desktop and IceWM 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 :)