Liberty's Blog

Hanging on to Old Reliable

Those of us who have owned computers since the early days, are slowing down in our computer buying habits. I have owned a computer since the late 70's, and until about 4 years ago I've pretty much upgraded or bought a new computer every 18 months. My main home computer is about 4 years old running 2000, and I haven't concidered upgrading it. It runs 24 /7 on a UPS and been through a harddrive and a few fans, but so far its been reliable. Equality has upgraded, from her el'cheapo WIN 98 computor of 5 years, to a new laptop within the last month. She also has traditionally upgraded to a new computer every 18 months to two years since around 1989. Her older computer is still at a desk connected to the nework and usable even if not used very much. It looks to me as technology has matured we have found that we just don't feel the need to upgrade as much. One reason is that most users aren't that demanding about speed, the most common usages of email, web surfing, and word processing aren't particularly cpu intencive. Those who have intrest in gaming and video proccessing, are still likely to upgrade more often. The biggest issues of upgrading are software issues. Our software represents a big part of our computing investment. finding serial numbers and chasing down those little utilities. Registry issues prevent us from just coppying folders to move a program from one computer to another. The time involved in installing some software is conciderable. It took me the best part of a whole day to install Visual Studio .NET. The reluctance of users to upgrade our computers result in lower sales for both software and hardware providers. John C. Dvorak had a say about this.

Even with the Internet, which is seen as a subsystem that requires little or no processing power, try surfing the Net with a sub–100-MHz processor and see how slowly those JPEGs uncompress.

The problem is the leap of faith. You just have to assume that good will come of faster and faster microprocessors. AMD now seems more intent on proving this than Intel, whose dual-core and 64-bit strategy now seems to be permanently lagging behind that of AMD and will continue to lag if the company actually believes all the Valley talk that the microprocessor business is dead.

One data point that would confirm this is the lengthening of the upgrade cycle. People keep their computers longer. From the mid-1980s to 1995, people were buying machines every 18 months at least. Now it's stretched to three years or more. I think that this change has most to do with the increasing difficulty of upgrading caused by Microsoft Windows and its architecture. You used to just port over all your apps, but if you do that today, only a few programs will work. You must reinstall most by hand. Good luck finding that serial number. The longer you keep the machine, the more these programs accumulate, making it worse.

One solution is migration tools that transfer the Registry and everything to the new machine. This creates two problems. The first is that the OS may not boot, since you've changed your configuration radically. The other is that you've moved a junked-up Registry from one machine to another. One reason to move to a new computer is to have a fresh machine with a clean Registry. You can't win.

Even though computers have gotten cheaper and faster, We are quite content with our 3 year plus computers. We might spend out money on a nice LCD monitor, or a new DVD recorder, but faster-newer doesn't always make sense to a lot of users.

posted by Liberty @ 1:10 PM