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When Is A Good Time To Upgrade?
Andru Edwards writes "In an article which looks at the techie's mindset as it pertains to upgrading, Hector Martinez takes a deeper look at what makes us want to buy the latest gadgets. What are your options, and when should you actually just keep what you already have?"
I upgrade to about the middle of the road when the prices drop. I can get asus boards for under $100 canadian and AMD 2400+ were only $80 can retail.
The new stuff is always way overpriced, and will come down just before it goes out of production.
I use mostly amd xp2400+ cpus in asus boards with Nvidia 5200's or ati 9200's. Does everything I need them to do.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
To fight the urge to constantly be upgrading the last 6 years my rule has been I can upgrade motherboard and CPU every other year and on the off year I can get a new video card. Also, never spend more than $150 on a video card, or $200 on a motherboard and processor. Of course some upgrade require new RAM, so it isn't a perfect rule.
Other than that I get a new hard drive about every 3 years and I've had to get a new power supply in there somewhere. This has worked well for me.
I upgrade when it's free to do so.. like when one of my friends is upgrading, and drops off their old stuff at my place - all the while *thanking* me for taking it. Truth is, a computer is possibly the worst place to 'invest' your money - perhaps even worse than a typical vehicle.
Despite the large amount of work I do on & around computers, I find that my needs are actually quite minimal. The K6-2 475 / 96MB laptop I'm writing from right now suits me just great, and is currently the fastest machine I own. Linux (Slackware in this case) goes a long way to make this kind of strategy a reality.
Also, it seems a bit out of character for the typical liberal, environmentally concious geek to constantly feed the beast by overconsuming electronics & gadgets. We do want to keep our nice little green world pretty, yes?
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
(well because adaptec scsi devices are so expensive)
You've got to be kidding! That and I'm buying scsi disks at about $50 for 36Gb now. Get an 80p-68p converter and take advantage of all the surplus raid drives out there.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I pretty much upgrade whenever a game comes out that I can't play with all the eye candy turned on. Which usually works out to every 12-18 months. Most upgrades are incremental as it usually only takes 1 or 2 components to remain current.
Gailin
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
My policy is that I upgrade when there is a 7x improvement in hardware speeds than my current machine at an affordable price. Right now my 700mhz machine is holding up just fine, and I have no problem doing development on it, or playing modest games, or its normal use- websurfing and mp3 jukebox. I am fairly sure that by the time we get to 5ghz, which right now feels like will take an eternity, I will become dissatisfied with the performance enough that I will want to upgrade. CPU speed isnt really what is making me drool, but things like PCI-X, hypertransport, the new fast front side busses, usb2.0, SATA, dual core processors, 64 bit processors, etc. do make me want to upgrade.
How did I come up w/ the 7x figure? My first real machine was a 100mhz pentium. Around 2000, it started falling behind the software advances, and I could not play free cell without mp3's skipping. This was during the race to 1ghz, and once the processors hit 1ghz the 700mhz chips were a relatively cheap $200 or so, so I went for it. Thats been the standard since.
Normally I upgrade part when they are either causing an insurmountable bottleneck on what I'm trying to do, or, the part has become flaky or just completely died
If the part has a replacement part that is faster or better than the current part, and, if by replacing that part I won't need to replace any other parts of my computer, and, the price for the new part is reasonable compared with what it was when it was "cutting edge" then I upgrade it.
Sometimes with the quality of new hardware though, I'm being forced into a quicker and quicker upgrade cycle as things like video cards or motherboards don't last like the used to.
The other reason for upgrading parts is when I see something that, if I don't buy it now, I won't be able to get that part for my computer again, for example I had a motherboard where the fastest CPU I could put in it was a Athlon XP 2000+, when they became the lowest available CPU and I knew stocks were running low I bought one so that my computer remained current for as long as possible.
Granted, it's got three hard drives, a new video card, and 576MB more RAM than it shipped with, but I don't think I'll be putting any more money into it, and I fully expect it to last another three years or more, so long as the power supply or mobo holds out.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Its much more impressive to me to see someone downgrade, albeit with new non-bloated software, than it is to see the 'latest and greatest' ricerbox being sliding off someones credit card ..
I dislike badly written software, (for example most MMORPG's have very poor 3D engines compared to most single player games - as an avid gamer this is a bug bear of mine) and I think it's been clear over the last 20 years that there are diminish returns in each upgrade cycle (Mac OS 6 through 9 were all faster to use for regular desktop bound tasks than Mac OS X for example, and it's not at all clear that the additional features are worth the disproportionate drop in speed - similar things can be said of the Windows platfom in comparing Windows XP to Windows 3.1).
I think it's fair to say that both Mac OS 7 and Windows 95 were faster for navigating directories, opening word processor documents and checking email on average hardware for the time than either Mac OS X or Windows XP are on significantly newer hardware. Linux on my 1.5 Ghz PowerBook is *staggeringly* fast compared to Mac OS X for example (so much so, that I'm very tempted to keep buying the hardware, because I like the feature set, but switch back to Debian). The very apparent lack of optimisation on Mac OS X is just staggering.
However...
I can honstly say that I find it much more impressive for me to see Doom 3, PlanetSide or Unreal 2 running on high end new hardware and it is to see that after months of hard work they have managed to port a rather mundane title to a 10 or 20 year old system. The price of not having bloated software is sometimes just that - a mesurable monetary cost which someone has to be willing to bear. Time, money and the very real resultant possiblity that if it can't be made quickly it can't be made at all (which in the case of some software, could be be bad for overall productivity).
I do think OS vendors have a lot to answer for - they are responsible for massive amounts of bloat (particularly Microsoft and Apple), but other than the period release of a new OS like XP or OS X, it's games more than anything that drive the cycle, and most developers are keen to do as much as they can to keep the performance as good as possible within reasonable limits.
I hear David Braben is working on a sequal to Elite, I'm sure it will be very tighly coded. I think perhaps it will be a long time coming though - if, dare I say it ever.
I do not think coding in assembly is very efficient, as it takes significantly longer to write complex software, which is why we have C (and other higher level languages). We should be picking the right battles I think. Perhaps by attacking poorly implimented and very inefficent high level languages and ensuring we have good compiler technology (and run time engines) to appropriatly optimise software to make use of the hardware it's running on.
Hardly any programs (certainly hardly any of the programs I use) take advantage of features like Altivec (on PPC G4's) or Hyperthreading (on Intel P4's) - having them do so by being appropriately written and having compilers that can do a good job of optimisation would be a big step in the right direction. It was the efforts of Motorola (donating code to GNU/FSF) and the work of companies like Red Hat and independant individuals that Altivec optimisation was added gcc for example - yet Apple rely on it, even ship it on CD/DVD with every Macintosh, as such many would think perhaps they should have been leading contributions to such a project. Which brings me to perhaps one of the best targets for bloatware critisim - vendors of commercial operating systems (i.e. Sun, Apple, Microsoft) - some of there software is frankly appaulingly slow given the hardware it runs on, and what they do in many ways sets the tone for the rest of the industry.
In Minnesota, garbage collectors won't take computer monitors in the trash. They won't take TV's either, and generally don't want things like microwaves and other computer hardware either. I don't know if the laws are different up here, or perhaps due to Arizona being a drier state they don't worry about the chemicals leeching out.
By the way, it costs about $15 up here to get a computer monitor recycled.
Recycling computers into raw materials is REALLY nasty.
A friend of mine just started working as the director of American Retroworks/Good Points Recycling, a small non-profit company here in Vermont that specializes in computer and electronics recycling. Their website is kindof a mess (I'm helping to fix that), but as can be seen in their white papers and publications, there is a serious problem with many 'recycling' operations selling to any buyer who will take their stuff, often leading to unscrupulous buyers purchasing tons of computers, pulling a few sellable parts off of them, then dumping the rest.
Retroworks (as a small non-profit) on the other hand is primarily concerned with envirnmental impact and focuses on distributing the electronics that they collect to operations that can reuse the computers/parts instead of trying to convert them back into raw materials. Apparently one of their biggest businesses is selling monitors with broken electronics to companies in china which then use the tubes (with new control electronics) in multimedia entertainment consoles that they sell there. Also, I believe that they are currently in negotiations with other environmentally focused electronics recycling firms to have an environmental standard for computer recycling that those wishing to dispose of their equipment can use as a reference to determine if their computer will actually be handled in an environmentally friendly[er] way. For now, they have this (PowerPoint) info on choosing an electronics diposer. This has some interesting info on the effects of poor recycling practices.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
"I'd love to buy a computer that was manufactured in a not-environmentally-hostile manner. However, with our current technology, that is not possible."
I think things are getting a bit better. I work for a company that produces hardware. We've just done a complete redesign across the board to get rid of the parts that contain lead. We had to do this because of a law that will soon be going into effect in Europe but it will help everywhere.