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Less Might Be More
Quantum Skyline writes "Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this? DevHardware has an opinion piece on 'leaner computing' and the author thinks that less might be more." This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
This is a VT100.
Ok, putting a Celeron and Athlon on the same level is just stupid. I know what you're trying to say, but a Celeron has nowhere near the cache an Athlon has. For example, I have an Athlon XP processor in my work machine, the 2500+ and it has 512 K of L2 cache. It also runs at 1.83 GHZ, but because of it's shorter pipeline vs the current generation of Celerons, it absolutely smokes a celeron, they aren't even in the same class in my opinion. Just because a processor is cheaper it doesn't mean it's on the same performance level. It would perform equal to or better than a Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GHZ if you pair the Athlon XP with dual channel DDR @ 333 or 400. Like I said, I realize what you're trying to say, and I think you're on the right track - but I would never compare a celeron to an Athlon in terms of performance. Price - ofcourse, but not performance - an Athlon is a much better buy if you're not stuck on Intel and will evaluate all your x86 options.
This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC
PCs are cheap enough now that they are competitive with terminals, consider the production volumes. I'm not talking about things you pick up from the dumpster around the back of the bank, but something that someone would pay for and get support for.
You also get some pretty good host integration features such as using the PC's local receipt printer without additional networking, not to mention the ability to change your POS software to something PC-based later on if you so choose.
It's not just your university, this is happening at most universities. At my state university, the library has probably 200 public use PCs spread in out in groups of four thruout the building. They're currently 3.2 GHz P4 systems with 17" LCD monitors. Last year they were different PCs, 2.8 GHz with 15" LCDs. Nobody seems to know where exactly the old machines went.Unlike the lab machines you mentioned, our library machines are mostly used to access the card catalog software and hotmail.com
Most of the labs on our campus are updated to the latest and greatest Dell models every 2 years. Thankfully they usually have plenty of ram, but the hard drive size is usually insanely large. I think most of the actual deparment labs now have 200+ GB drives---that's pretty big for machines that get reimaged via Norton Ghost every Saturday morning.
And yet, we still have neglected labs. You know the type, the labs that look like what you find in most highschools---Pentium 1 systems running an unoptimized stock install of Win98, running slow. For some reason, our most neglected labs are those that get the most real usage.
Next time you pay your tuition, check the fees section. This semester my tuition included ~$400 "Campus Technology Fee".
Running a machine 24/7 will actually help with the lifetime of the hardware because it won't be constantly heating up and cooling down. This is what causes a fair proportion of hardware failures.
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.