There's resolution and then there's dot pitch. The two common dot pitches are 0.285mm and 0.255mm. Which works out to ~90ppi for the 0.285 pitch and ~100ppi for 0.255 pitch.
What you'll find is that most web designers out there make the assumption that your display is running at 96ppi (pixels per inch). That means they will calculate the font size that "looks good" in pixels and apply it to the web page by saying 10px or 8px or 12px.
Needless to say, this causes all sorts of issues when you try viewing web pages on a 125ppi display (such as the 1400x1050 15" display on my Tecra 9100). Opera's web browser has the best solution (that I've heard of) where it rescales the entire page (images and all). Firefox simply lets you set minimum text sizes but leaves the images alone.
So... for our older users, we're going with the 0.285 pitch displays. While "Large Fonts" in Windows XP mostly works, it does cause issues in a lot of cases (dialogs not resized properly etc). WinVista might be better, but we're not planning on allowing that inside the company until at least mid-late 2008. These users have enough trouble with 1024x768 on a 17" CRT.
And here are the latest prices. The cost of the 1280x1024 displays is so low compared to the 1600x1200 displays that a dual-display setup can be a better choice in a lot of situations. The 19" SXGAs are what I consider to be the sweet spot with the WXGA+ displays a close runner-up.
I didn't have to convert all my music to apples format or anything else.
Hmmm, the last time I heard, Apple iPods play MP3s natively. With no conversion required. Maybe you're thinking of Sony's ATRAC players? Or maybe you were trying to play the "Ogg" card?
(The main reason I don't own an iPod is that I simply don't travel enough. For my monthly business trips, I simply use MP3 CDs in the car's dash player. Or I listen to music off of my laptop while working. And I have portable MP3 players that take SD cards for the very few other occasions. What I have works well enough that I don't need an iPod.)
Unfortunately, very few people understood the concept of the original Palm III/IV.
A small device that allows you to access information while away from your desktop without requiring the expense / weight / size of a laptop. Not a device for watching videos on, or listening to music, or editing spreadsheets / documents in their native format. Even nicer was the issue that the simple black and white screen gave you 2-4 *weeks* of operating time on a single set of batteries (in the III series).
You could, if you were careful, go away on a 2 week business trip needing nothing more then your cell phone and PDA. It was a great way to carry information in a compact manner. And some the more applications you installed on it, the more worthwhile it was (such as diet tracking, exercise tracking, automotive expense tracking, expense account tracking, or just financial tracking).
However, very few people now fit into that market. Laptops are a lot less expensive, so you spend less time away from a heavy desk-bound desktop. Some laptops are pretty tiny, taking away the size issue (somewhat). Cell phones got a lot more powerful, allowing you to use them as address books (and sometimes calendar / to-do lists).
Me? I retired my old Palm III and moved to a PalmOS phone made by Kyocera. It still does everything I need. Still runs my old PalmOS applications and I can still go a few days between charges (depending on how much I use it as a phone).
Memory is so cheap now and I'm sure we can get four gigs under a hundred bucks soon, too.
For the Flash Card market (SD and CF):
1GB - between $18 and $30 (usually $20 to $25)
2GB - $32 to $50 ($40-$45 more likely)
4GB - $65 to $120 ($70-$75 seems common)
8GB - (CF only) - $140 to $285 (most are $140-$150)
All of a sudden, designing a web page that looks good at anything between 600x800 to 2400X3840 seems like a heck of a challenge. Then again, maybe people will just stop browsing the web in full screen.
I suspect what will happen is that the web browser folks will offer to scale images on the fly. I've heard that Opera already has this capability.
The display makers are locked in a tech/market dominance war and have been bleeding cash for years, each hoping to make it up by being the last man standing. They can "afford" to do this because they have other, profitable, lines covering the losses. We're not talking garage businesses here. We're talking Samsung and the like.
I wonder if that's why the 15" 1024x768 displays have been pretty much abandoned as a market? And the 17" 1024x768 LCD displays seem to be headed the same way as well.
(There are lots of companies willing to sell you 1280x1024 17/19" displays, but very few still making or stocking the older 15"/17" 1024x768 displays.)
That's true... I've even had such a laptop. But it was horrifically slow, and an enormous RAM upgrade wouldn't have changed that.
That might depend on when you bought the laptop. Stuff from 2001 and prior was still part of the "not quite there" era. Plus, computer power was doubling every 12-15 months in the late 90s (up until around 2002). But after 2002, it took about another 4 years for computers to double in power again.
For example, IIRC, a fast machine in 2000/2001 was a 1GHz CPU. By 2002, the 1.7-2.0GHz Pentium 4s were available. But things topped out at around 3.4GHz around 2005/2006 (Pentium 4 CPUs). I might be off on my dates a bit.
So if you bought a machine in 2002 or later, you probably have something that will be reasonably capable until 2010 if taken care of.
I definitely won't classify this laptop as fast, but as long as I stay within my 1GB memory limit it works well. Over the past 4 years, I've upgraded the HD to a 100GB model, moved the memory from 512MB to 1GB, replaced the keyboard / mouse buttons, had a new DVD drive put in and will get the backlight replaced next year (before handing it off to a less demanding user).
Also, something I'm confused about... I haven't seen a laptop with more than 2GB of RAM, and even 2GB is rare enough. Why are people so worried about the 4GB barrier for a computer to come out this fall?
Depends on your application, I guess. For developers, there's no such thing as "enough RAM". Especially when getting into things like virtualization where you have multiple servers running at the same time as part of your test suite. Or having the compiler, 6 web browsers, documentation, spreadsheets and a few dozen other applications all running at the same time.
For video editing, more memory means video files can either be put into a RAM disk or simply use the extra memory for cache (making NLE faster).
Photography memory needs are also slowly changing. Used to be a that a 3-megapixel picture was "large" (figure 9MB of RAM used). Now we have 7-megapixel cameras in common use which doubles the memory requirement. If you're working with multiple pictures at the same time, it's not long before you're into the 1-2GB of working set territory.
But, as you say, until the 4GB SODIMMs show up on the market, it's a bit of a moot point. I know the T60 Core Duo only supports 2GB SODIMMs with no word on 4GB SODIMMs, but if the new Merom laptops support 4GB SODIMMs I can see them being installed in the next 3 years.
Heck, I'd give my eyeteeth to be able to upgrade past 1GB on this Tecra 9100. If I could've dropped another 1GB of RAM into the unit, I'd keep it for even longer rather then moving to a newer 2GB dual-core laptop (next year).
Mine has two seagates and a WD right now, and although they don't have fans, they all have at least an inch of clearence above them for the heat to escape to, and openings around them for the heat to get out of the case.
That only helps if there's air moving in those gaps. If the air isn't moving, it just sits there and cooks the drive. Fortunately, it doesn't take much airflow to cool a drive. (I've seen SATA drives cook in a fanless bay, even with 1+ inch of space all around the drive.)
Hopefully you're monitoring your drive temps with SpeedFan or lm_sensors.
Core 2 Duos are in the low-end Dimension line and also the high end Precision line.
Oddly enough, it's cheaper to buy the equivalent machine through the Precision line rather then bumping a Dimension up to the same specs. The Precision includes XP Pro by default, the Dimension adds $140 to the price for XP Pro.
(I was spec'ing dual-core 2GB Win XP Pro systems.)
I believe it was a compaq mini-tower case with IDE and 128MB. (At the time, the large corporation that I worked for had a hardware deal with Compaq.)
Even modern designs don't seem to take heat into account. I've seen a few Dell systems where airflow for the hard drive easily becomes sub-optimal and the hard drive will cook itself under moderate load.
I run a few different hardware configurations for cooling drives. The most effective is a bay cooler that takes up (2) 5.25" bays and holds 1-3 3.5" drives. If you only put (2) 3.5" drives in, and keep them slighly apart (about 1/2" between), the 80mm fan will push air over both drives at a hefty clip. Typical temperatures for those drives are 30C idle and 32C active. I suspect those drives are going to last forever because of the low-temperature change. One of those is a WD 10k RPM Raptor.
Some of the Antec cases do an okay job of cooling the drive bays. (Sonata, Sonata II, p160, p180/p180b.) The p180b has the most potential due to the design and the ability to add multiple 120mm fans to the case in various locations.
There's also a 4-in-3 bay cooler design that fits within (3) 5.25" bays and holds 4 drives. I use that on the p160 and p180 Antec cases to fit (4) drives into the upper drive bays.
I've used Tsunami for a number of years as well now. Very good encoder at a reasonable price point. Plus they do offer AC3 compression (not sure if it's still only 2-channel).
Audio is a big bit hog. PCM is 1536kbits/sec while AC3 can be down around 256kbits/sec. That could be the difference between 4000kbits/sec for your video stream and 5200kbits/sec for your video stream.
(I find that 4000kbits for full-D1 video is really pushing the lower limit of acceptable. Unless you have a super clean source file. So the extra 1200kbits/sec means a lot.)
If you're in the swap file, more (slow) RAM is better then no RAM at all. Not having enough RAM will kill performance by at least 1 order of magnitude (maybe 2). The difference between PC2100 and PC3200 RAM isn't even close to a 10x to 100x increase.
The next time you visit your folks, try and catch them after using the PC for a few hours. Go into Task Manager and look at the peak memory used. If it's anything over 75% of physical RAM (as a general guideline), you should spend the ~$50 to double the memory.
Most users will benefit from a bump from 256MB to 512MB for a Windows XP system. And there's a large subset who would even benefit from 1GB of RAM. Especially if the system has been heavily used and tweaked for a few months.
A good quality laptop can easily last 5 years. You can even get the backlight replaced for say $300 in year 4 and give it another 2-3 years of use. Batteries are a sore spot and usually have to be replaced after the first few years as well.
(Typing this on a 4.5 year old Tecra 9100 w/ 1GB of RAM.)
32MB for OS/2
128MB for NT4
256MB for Win2k
512MB for WinXP
Most of the time we try to double those memory levels in new systems. Hopefully with the ability to double-up again a few years down the road.
I killed at least one HD back in the NT4 days because I only had 128MB of RAM. I was spending so much time in the swap file that the disk quickly gave up and died.
My work computers run XP SP2 with a 733mhz processor and 256mb RAM. Sure, it's not blazingly fast, but it gets the job done.
I wonder (seriously) how much faster it would seem with 512MB or 768MB. My 1.7GHz laptop with 1GB of RAM is okay, but feels a bit on the slow side some days. Heaven help me if I dip into the swap file. (I'm at 870MB in use right now.)
For a new system, the extra $50 for the 2nd GB of RAM is probably not a bad purchase. Especially if it allows you to leave 2 slots free for future expandability. For the systems at work, we're spending the extra ~$100/machine to take them to dual-core and 2GB of RAM rather then trying to make do with 1GB and single-core.
It's a bit overkill now, but 5 years down the road those machines will still be viable.
I also find that once users have the power, they will start to multi-task more until the machine starts to stutter under the load again. With dual-core / 2GB machines I think they're going to be a while before they get to that point.
1) Personal and/or important - Just like you I use the unread flags to track status and set follow-up flags on things that can't be taken care of right away. Older messages get archived by year, making it fairly easy to search without being too difficult to file. And a mis-file isn't very expensive because I can simply search multiple year folders at the same time.
2) Newsletters, announcements, other junk but not spam - Those messages get sorted out to sub-folders automatically by rules and periodically reviewed/deleted.
(I'm a hoarder as well... subscribed to 75 e-mail lists, plus dozens of announce-only newsletter lists, plus the daily deluge of work/personal e-mail.)
What's your price point? You can build a pretty good bare-bones machine for around $750. (MWave part numbers)
MB-BA22658 AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4200+
BA22972 ASUS M2N-E nVIDIA nFORCE 570ULTRA CHIPSET SERIAL ATA300 ATX
BA20518 MWAVE 2x 1GB 533MHZ NON-ECC 240-PIN DDR2 DIMM
$425 for the CPU/MB/RAM, plus it comes assembled and tested
$103 BA30107 ANTEC SONATA II (BLACK) MID TOWER W/SMARTPOWER 2.0 450W ATX
$80 SATA-II drive (250GB)
$9 Floppy drive
$37 DVD-RW
$100 mid-range PCIe video card
----
$329 for the misc components
Other notes:
X2 3800+ is $34 cheaper
1GB of RAM is $65 cheaper
Integrated graphics would save a bit
If all you want is a basic office machine, you can cut the price down to around $400 if you go with integrated graphics, smaller hard drives, 1GB of RAM and an inexpensive single-core CPU. We're opting for a bit more future-proofing and spending around $550 (hardware costs) for our office machines (dual-core and 2GB).
Assembly time is about 2 hours and we'll pay around $75 in shipping costs for parts. But we get machines that are exactly what we want and we're not afraid of doing our own tech support. Replacement parts are easier because everything is standard commodity parts. Nothing proprietary in the mix that we'd have to worry about not being replaceable. It also helps that we have spare parts laying around which is cutting a bit off the build cost.
PCs are becoming overconfigured underused status symbols and far less utilitarian.
Which decade are you from? That was just as true back in the mid-90s as it is today. It was probably even true back in the mid-80s (look at who got the color terminals on their desk while the peons worked in green/white or amber/white).
OTOH, I work at a company where that doesn't hold true. The people who need the CPU power get the fastest and newest machines, with the slightly used 2 year old machine going to the less demanding users. It probably helps that it's a small business where the management structure is loose enough not to get hung up on "toys".
I think that applies to other computer companies, not just Dell. If you buy the consumer level goods (laptops, desktops) you're in for a ride. OTOH, if you spend just a little more and buy the business-level products, you get a machine that is going to last a few years longer.
We've done a good bit of business with Dell over the years. Support has been fairly good, but I'm not taken with it enough to continue buying Dell (or any other proprietary solution). Instead, we're switching to simply building our own for about 2/3s to 3/4 of the cost of Dell's products.
Thinkpads don't really cost "so much". They're right in line with the rest of the business class notebooks (not consumer-level junk). Their competition is machines like the Toshiba Tecra or the Dell Latitude.
The two units on my current "short list" from June 2006 are:
$2054 Tecra M5 - Core Duo CPU (2-CPUs in one), 2 cores @ 1.67MHz each. 2GB RAM, 1400x1050 14" SXGA+, NVIDIA® Quadro® NVS 110M 128MB video, 60GB HDD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, 802.11a/b/g, BlueTooth, 3-year warranty. Add $80 if you want the DVD-burner.
$2150 Lenovo T60 2GB 1400x1050 14" Core Duo 1.8GHz (similar specs as the M5 but no Firewire or SD Card slot)
As a comparison, my first business-class laptop back in 2000 cost around $3300 and only lasted for 2 years before I upgraded. I'm still using that 2nd laptop that we purchased in 2002 for around $2700 and might finally upgrade next spring after 5 years.
I'm in a similar situation. Because I rarely travel for business, don't commute daily and listen to most of my music while in my home office, an iPod would be a bit much. So I went the CD+MP3 route back in 2001 and have been pretty happy with it. The 10 CDs in my visor holder are easy enough to switch while driving without being overly distracting and each CD holds 6-10 hours of music.
My current head unit is a JVC KD-G720 which also includes a USB port on the front. I like it better then my old JVC unit from 2001. MP3 support has improved a lot since the early days.
And I do wish that they would start supporting 4GB DVD-Rs. Sometimes it's tough to pare collections down enough to fit on a 700MB CD.
I also say you're wasting money. Unless you're getting paid to push data through a CPU or hard drive as fast as possible. Then it makes sense to upgrade more frequently (especially now that dual-cores are here).
Back in the mid-late 90s, your attitude made sense. After all, PCs were doubling in performance every 12-15 months and a 3 year old machine was dog slow and very outclassed by new offerings. (Such as the move from 286 to 386.) Disk sizes were also doubling very quickly. That 3 year old machine was about 1/8th the power of a brand new box. A new machine every 2 years paid for itself in increased productivity.
But look at how things have played out from 2000-2006. Other then the advent of dual-core, processor speeds have taken about 5 years to double (okay, maybe triple). Which is a lot slower increase per year then the 90s. Hard drive sizes were stuck at 500GB at the upper end until Perpendicular Recording finally made it out of the labs. So a 3-year old machine in today's environment could be anywhere from 50% to 66% the speed of a brand new reasonably-priced single core machine from 2006. And as long as it has enough RAM, the average user probably won't consider it to be too slow.
Our planned lifespan for new single-core machines with 1GB of RAM is now 5 years. With the possibility of adding another 1-2 GB of RAM down the road to extend that lifespan another 2-3 years. Now that processor prices have dropped on the X2 AMDs, we're spending the extra $60 and putting 64bit dual-cores in every system. That should easily gain us lifespans of 8-12 years for the machines before they are too slow for even low-end light-duty office work. All for about $500-$600 in hardware costs (and another $450 in software costs).
The era of the 3-year lifespan machine is pretty much dead. You may be upgrading more frequently, but the older machines should be passed down the line to less demanding users. Heck, I keep saying that I'm going to upgrade now that dual-core is here, but my 4-year old laptop (1.7GHz 1GB RAM) is still running very well (replaced the keyboard and DVD 3 months ago and it feels like a new machine).
They exist. Usually small businesses rather the mid-large businesses. I've been working for one for the past few years. Look for something owned and managed by the same person.
The downside is that small businesses don't have large coffers to suffer through economic downturns so your job is more at risk then in a large corporation.
The magic word for you is "motherboard bundles" at places like MWave. They tell you what CPU goes with what motherboard and give you a list of RAM configs. They'll even put it together and test it for $9.
Hardest part is then figuring out what motherboard to use.
(And I don't care what the smartass's have to say. I buy wherever the "knee" of the price/performance curve is. Usually whatever was "hot" 12 months ago now sells for a good price.)
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There's resolution and then there's dot pitch. The two common dot pitches are 0.285mm and 0.255mm. Which works out to ~90ppi for the 0.285 pitch and ~100ppi for 0.255 pitch.
What you'll find is that most web designers out there make the assumption that your display is running at 96ppi (pixels per inch). That means they will calculate the font size that "looks good" in pixels and apply it to the web page by saying 10px or 8px or 12px.
Needless to say, this causes all sorts of issues when you try viewing web pages on a 125ppi display (such as the 1400x1050 15" display on my Tecra 9100). Opera's web browser has the best solution (that I've heard of) where it rescales the entire page (images and all). Firefox simply lets you set minimum text sizes but leaves the images alone.
So... for our older users, we're going with the 0.285 pitch displays. While "Large Fonts" in Windows XP mostly works, it does cause issues in a lot of cases (dialogs not resized properly etc). WinVista might be better, but we're not planning on allowing that inside the company until at least mid-late 2008. These users have enough trouble with 1024x768 on a 17" CRT.
And here are the latest prices. The cost of the 1280x1024 displays is so low compared to the 1600x1200 displays that a dual-display setup can be a better choice in a lot of situations. The 19" SXGAs are what I consider to be the sweet spot with the WXGA+ displays a close runner-up.
XGA 17" 1024x768 - $150
SXGA 19" 0.294 1280x1024 - $180
WXGA+ 1400x900 0.285 19" $190
WSXGA 1680x1050 0.258 20" $290
UXGA 1600x1200 0.255 20" $360
I didn't have to convert all my music to apples format or anything else.
Hmmm, the last time I heard, Apple iPods play MP3s natively. With no conversion required. Maybe you're thinking of Sony's ATRAC players? Or maybe you were trying to play the "Ogg" card?
(The main reason I don't own an iPod is that I simply don't travel enough. For my monthly business trips, I simply use MP3 CDs in the car's dash player. Or I listen to music off of my laptop while working. And I have portable MP3 players that take SD cards for the very few other occasions. What I have works well enough that I don't need an iPod.)
Unfortunately, very few people understood the concept of the original Palm III/IV.
A small device that allows you to access information while away from your desktop without requiring the expense / weight / size of a laptop. Not a device for watching videos on, or listening to music, or editing spreadsheets / documents in their native format. Even nicer was the issue that the simple black and white screen gave you 2-4 *weeks* of operating time on a single set of batteries (in the III series).
You could, if you were careful, go away on a 2 week business trip needing nothing more then your cell phone and PDA. It was a great way to carry information in a compact manner. And some the more applications you installed on it, the more worthwhile it was (such as diet tracking, exercise tracking, automotive expense tracking, expense account tracking, or just financial tracking).
However, very few people now fit into that market. Laptops are a lot less expensive, so you spend less time away from a heavy desk-bound desktop. Some laptops are pretty tiny, taking away the size issue (somewhat). Cell phones got a lot more powerful, allowing you to use them as address books (and sometimes calendar / to-do lists).
Me? I retired my old Palm III and moved to a PalmOS phone made by Kyocera. It still does everything I need. Still runs my old PalmOS applications and I can still go a few days between charges (depending on how much I use it as a phone).
Memory is so cheap now and I'm sure we can get four gigs under a hundred bucks soon, too.
For the Flash Card market (SD and CF):
1GB - between $18 and $30 (usually $20 to $25)
2GB - $32 to $50 ($40-$45 more likely)
4GB - $65 to $120 ($70-$75 seems common)
8GB - (CF only) - $140 to $285 (most are $140-$150)
All of a sudden, designing a web page that looks good at anything between 600x800 to 2400X3840 seems like a heck of a challenge. Then again, maybe people will just stop browsing the web in full screen.
I suspect what will happen is that the web browser folks will offer to scale images on the fly. I've heard that Opera already has this capability.
The display makers are locked in a tech/market dominance war and have been bleeding cash for years, each hoping to make it up by being the last man standing. They can "afford" to do this because they have other, profitable, lines covering the losses. We're not talking garage businesses here. We're talking Samsung and the like.
I wonder if that's why the 15" 1024x768 displays have been pretty much abandoned as a market? And the 17" 1024x768 LCD displays seem to be headed the same way as well.
(There are lots of companies willing to sell you 1280x1024 17/19" displays, but very few still making or stocking the older 15"/17" 1024x768 displays.)
That's true... I've even had such a laptop. But it was horrifically slow, and an enormous RAM upgrade wouldn't have changed that.
That might depend on when you bought the laptop. Stuff from 2001 and prior was still part of the "not quite there" era. Plus, computer power was doubling every 12-15 months in the late 90s (up until around 2002). But after 2002, it took about another 4 years for computers to double in power again.
For example, IIRC, a fast machine in 2000/2001 was a 1GHz CPU. By 2002, the 1.7-2.0GHz Pentium 4s were available. But things topped out at around 3.4GHz around 2005/2006 (Pentium 4 CPUs). I might be off on my dates a bit.
So if you bought a machine in 2002 or later, you probably have something that will be reasonably capable until 2010 if taken care of.
I definitely won't classify this laptop as fast, but as long as I stay within my 1GB memory limit it works well. Over the past 4 years, I've upgraded the HD to a 100GB model, moved the memory from 512MB to 1GB, replaced the keyboard / mouse buttons, had a new DVD drive put in and will get the backlight replaced next year (before handing it off to a less demanding user).
Also, something I'm confused about... I haven't seen a laptop with more than 2GB of RAM, and even 2GB is rare enough. Why are people so worried about the 4GB barrier for a computer to come out this fall?
Depends on your application, I guess. For developers, there's no such thing as "enough RAM". Especially when getting into things like virtualization where you have multiple servers running at the same time as part of your test suite. Or having the compiler, 6 web browsers, documentation, spreadsheets and a few dozen other applications all running at the same time.
For video editing, more memory means video files can either be put into a RAM disk or simply use the extra memory for cache (making NLE faster).
Photography memory needs are also slowly changing. Used to be a that a 3-megapixel picture was "large" (figure 9MB of RAM used). Now we have 7-megapixel cameras in common use which doubles the memory requirement. If you're working with multiple pictures at the same time, it's not long before you're into the 1-2GB of working set territory.
But, as you say, until the 4GB SODIMMs show up on the market, it's a bit of a moot point. I know the T60 Core Duo only supports 2GB SODIMMs with no word on 4GB SODIMMs, but if the new Merom laptops support 4GB SODIMMs I can see them being installed in the next 3 years.
Heck, I'd give my eyeteeth to be able to upgrade past 1GB on this Tecra 9100. If I could've dropped another 1GB of RAM into the unit, I'd keep it for even longer rather then moving to a newer 2GB dual-core laptop (next year).
Mine has two seagates and a WD right now, and although they don't have fans, they all have at least an inch of clearence above them for the heat to escape to, and openings around them for the heat to get out of the case.
That only helps if there's air moving in those gaps. If the air isn't moving, it just sits there and cooks the drive. Fortunately, it doesn't take much airflow to cool a drive. (I've seen SATA drives cook in a fanless bay, even with 1+ inch of space all around the drive.)
Hopefully you're monitoring your drive temps with SpeedFan or lm_sensors.
Core 2 Duos are in the low-end Dimension line and also the high end Precision line.
Oddly enough, it's cheaper to buy the equivalent machine through the Precision line rather then bumping a Dimension up to the same specs. The Precision includes XP Pro by default, the Dimension adds $140 to the price for XP Pro.
(I was spec'ing dual-core 2GB Win XP Pro systems.)
I believe it was a compaq mini-tower case with IDE and 128MB. (At the time, the large corporation that I worked for had a hardware deal with Compaq.)
Even modern designs don't seem to take heat into account. I've seen a few Dell systems where airflow for the hard drive easily becomes sub-optimal and the hard drive will cook itself under moderate load.
I run a few different hardware configurations for cooling drives. The most effective is a bay cooler that takes up (2) 5.25" bays and holds 1-3 3.5" drives. If you only put (2) 3.5" drives in, and keep them slighly apart (about 1/2" between), the 80mm fan will push air over both drives at a hefty clip. Typical temperatures for those drives are 30C idle and 32C active. I suspect those drives are going to last forever because of the low-temperature change. One of those is a WD 10k RPM Raptor.
Some of the Antec cases do an okay job of cooling the drive bays. (Sonata, Sonata II, p160, p180/p180b.) The p180b has the most potential due to the design and the ability to add multiple 120mm fans to the case in various locations.
There's also a 4-in-3 bay cooler design that fits within (3) 5.25" bays and holds 4 drives. I use that on the p160 and p180 Antec cases to fit (4) drives into the upper drive bays.
I've used Tsunami for a number of years as well now. Very good encoder at a reasonable price point. Plus they do offer AC3 compression (not sure if it's still only 2-channel).
Audio is a big bit hog. PCM is 1536kbits/sec while AC3 can be down around 256kbits/sec. That could be the difference between 4000kbits/sec for your video stream and 5200kbits/sec for your video stream.
(I find that 4000kbits for full-D1 video is really pushing the lower limit of acceptable. Unless you have a super clean source file. So the extra 1200kbits/sec means a lot.)
If you're in the swap file, more (slow) RAM is better then no RAM at all. Not having enough RAM will kill performance by at least 1 order of magnitude (maybe 2). The difference between PC2100 and PC3200 RAM isn't even close to a 10x to 100x increase.
The next time you visit your folks, try and catch them after using the PC for a few hours. Go into Task Manager and look at the peak memory used. If it's anything over 75% of physical RAM (as a general guideline), you should spend the ~$50 to double the memory.
Most users will benefit from a bump from 256MB to 512MB for a Windows XP system. And there's a large subset who would even benefit from 1GB of RAM. Especially if the system has been heavily used and tweaked for a few months.
A good quality laptop can easily last 5 years. You can even get the backlight replaced for say $300 in year 4 and give it another 2-3 years of use. Batteries are a sore spot and usually have to be replaced after the first few years as well.
(Typing this on a 4.5 year old Tecra 9100 w/ 1GB of RAM.)
My comfort zone for average users was:
32MB for OS/2
128MB for NT4
256MB for Win2k
512MB for WinXP
Most of the time we try to double those memory levels in new systems. Hopefully with the ability to double-up again a few years down the road.
I killed at least one HD back in the NT4 days because I only had 128MB of RAM. I was spending so much time in the swap file that the disk quickly gave up and died.
My work computers run XP SP2 with a 733mhz processor and 256mb RAM. Sure, it's not blazingly fast, but it gets the job done.
I wonder (seriously) how much faster it would seem with 512MB or 768MB. My 1.7GHz laptop with 1GB of RAM is okay, but feels a bit on the slow side some days. Heaven help me if I dip into the swap file. (I'm at 870MB in use right now.)
For a new system, the extra $50 for the 2nd GB of RAM is probably not a bad purchase. Especially if it allows you to leave 2 slots free for future expandability. For the systems at work, we're spending the extra ~$100/machine to take them to dual-core and 2GB of RAM rather then trying to make do with 1GB and single-core.
It's a bit overkill now, but 5 years down the road those machines will still be viable.
I also find that once users have the power, they will start to multi-task more until the machine starts to stutter under the load again. With dual-core / 2GB machines I think they're going to be a while before they get to that point.
I simply separate my e-mail into two categories:
1) Personal and/or important - Just like you I use the unread flags to track status and set follow-up flags on things that can't be taken care of right away. Older messages get archived by year, making it fairly easy to search without being too difficult to file. And a mis-file isn't very expensive because I can simply search multiple year folders at the same time.
2) Newsletters, announcements, other junk but not spam - Those messages get sorted out to sub-folders automatically by rules and periodically reviewed/deleted.
(I'm a hoarder as well... subscribed to 75 e-mail lists, plus dozens of announce-only newsletter lists, plus the daily deluge of work/personal e-mail.)
What's your price point? You can build a pretty good bare-bones machine for around $750. (MWave part numbers)
MB-BA22658 AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4200+
BA22972 ASUS M2N-E nVIDIA nFORCE 570ULTRA CHIPSET SERIAL ATA300 ATX
BA20518 MWAVE 2x 1GB 533MHZ NON-ECC 240-PIN DDR2 DIMM
$425 for the CPU/MB/RAM, plus it comes assembled and tested
$103 BA30107 ANTEC SONATA II (BLACK) MID TOWER W/SMARTPOWER 2.0 450W ATX
$80 SATA-II drive (250GB)
$9 Floppy drive
$37 DVD-RW
$100 mid-range PCIe video card
----
$329 for the misc components
Other notes:
X2 3800+ is $34 cheaper
1GB of RAM is $65 cheaper
Integrated graphics would save a bit
If all you want is a basic office machine, you can cut the price down to around $400 if you go with integrated graphics, smaller hard drives, 1GB of RAM and an inexpensive single-core CPU. We're opting for a bit more future-proofing and spending around $550 (hardware costs) for our office machines (dual-core and 2GB).
Assembly time is about 2 hours and we'll pay around $75 in shipping costs for parts. But we get machines that are exactly what we want and we're not afraid of doing our own tech support. Replacement parts are easier because everything is standard commodity parts. Nothing proprietary in the mix that we'd have to worry about not being replaceable. It also helps that we have spare parts laying around which is cutting a bit off the build cost.
PCs are becoming overconfigured underused status symbols and far less utilitarian.
Which decade are you from? That was just as true back in the mid-90s as it is today. It was probably even true back in the mid-80s (look at who got the color terminals on their desk while the peons worked in green/white or amber/white).
OTOH, I work at a company where that doesn't hold true. The people who need the CPU power get the fastest and newest machines, with the slightly used 2 year old machine going to the less demanding users. It probably helps that it's a small business where the management structure is loose enough not to get hung up on "toys".
I think that applies to other computer companies, not just Dell. If you buy the consumer level goods (laptops, desktops) you're in for a ride. OTOH, if you spend just a little more and buy the business-level products, you get a machine that is going to last a few years longer.
We've done a good bit of business with Dell over the years. Support has been fairly good, but I'm not taken with it enough to continue buying Dell (or any other proprietary solution). Instead, we're switching to simply building our own for about 2/3s to 3/4 of the cost of Dell's products.
Thinkpads don't really cost "so much". They're right in line with the rest of the business class notebooks (not consumer-level junk). Their competition is machines like the Toshiba Tecra or the Dell Latitude.
The two units on my current "short list" from June 2006 are:
$2054 Tecra M5 - Core Duo CPU (2-CPUs in one), 2 cores @ 1.67MHz each. 2GB RAM, 1400x1050 14" SXGA+, NVIDIA® Quadro® NVS 110M 128MB video, 60GB HDD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM, 802.11a/b/g, BlueTooth, 3-year warranty. Add $80 if you want the DVD-burner.
$2150 Lenovo T60 2GB 1400x1050 14" Core Duo 1.8GHz (similar specs as the M5 but no Firewire or SD Card slot)
As a comparison, my first business-class laptop back in 2000 cost around $3300 and only lasted for 2 years before I upgraded. I'm still using that 2nd laptop that we purchased in 2002 for around $2700 and might finally upgrade next spring after 5 years.
I'm in a similar situation. Because I rarely travel for business, don't commute daily and listen to most of my music while in my home office, an iPod would be a bit much. So I went the CD+MP3 route back in 2001 and have been pretty happy with it. The 10 CDs in my visor holder are easy enough to switch while driving without being overly distracting and each CD holds 6-10 hours of music.
My current head unit is a JVC KD-G720 which also includes a USB port on the front. I like it better then my old JVC unit from 2001. MP3 support has improved a lot since the early days.
And I do wish that they would start supporting 4GB DVD-Rs. Sometimes it's tough to pare collections down enough to fit on a 700MB CD.
Only the high-end Intel chips have the 4MB of L2 cache. Most of the mid-range chips are only 2MB of L2 cache.
I also say you're wasting money. Unless you're getting paid to push data through a CPU or hard drive as fast as possible. Then it makes sense to upgrade more frequently (especially now that dual-cores are here).
Back in the mid-late 90s, your attitude made sense. After all, PCs were doubling in performance every 12-15 months and a 3 year old machine was dog slow and very outclassed by new offerings. (Such as the move from 286 to 386.) Disk sizes were also doubling very quickly. That 3 year old machine was about 1/8th the power of a brand new box. A new machine every 2 years paid for itself in increased productivity.
But look at how things have played out from 2000-2006. Other then the advent of dual-core, processor speeds have taken about 5 years to double (okay, maybe triple). Which is a lot slower increase per year then the 90s. Hard drive sizes were stuck at 500GB at the upper end until Perpendicular Recording finally made it out of the labs. So a 3-year old machine in today's environment could be anywhere from 50% to 66% the speed of a brand new reasonably-priced single core machine from 2006. And as long as it has enough RAM, the average user probably won't consider it to be too slow.
Our planned lifespan for new single-core machines with 1GB of RAM is now 5 years. With the possibility of adding another 1-2 GB of RAM down the road to extend that lifespan another 2-3 years. Now that processor prices have dropped on the X2 AMDs, we're spending the extra $60 and putting 64bit dual-cores in every system. That should easily gain us lifespans of 8-12 years for the machines before they are too slow for even low-end light-duty office work. All for about $500-$600 in hardware costs (and another $450 in software costs).
The era of the 3-year lifespan machine is pretty much dead. You may be upgrading more frequently, but the older machines should be passed down the line to less demanding users. Heck, I keep saying that I'm going to upgrade now that dual-core is here, but my 4-year old laptop (1.7GHz 1GB RAM) is still running very well (replaced the keyboard and DVD 3 months ago and it feels like a new machine).
They exist. Usually small businesses rather the mid-large businesses. I've been working for one for the past few years. Look for something owned and managed by the same person.
The downside is that small businesses don't have large coffers to suffer through economic downturns so your job is more at risk then in a large corporation.
The magic word for you is "motherboard bundles" at places like MWave. They tell you what CPU goes with what motherboard and give you a list of RAM configs. They'll even put it together and test it for $9.
Hardest part is then figuring out what motherboard to use.
(And I don't care what the smartass's have to say. I buy wherever the "knee" of the price/performance curve is. Usually whatever was "hot" 12 months ago now sells for a good price.)