Has personal computer technology reached a point where it is possible to avoid expensive upgrades for the forseeable future? Has it been there for 10 years?
A friend asked me if it's possible to build him a computer that would last 10 years. I told him it was no problem. I'm sure there are few people today who are accurately predicting what the PC circa 2019 will be able to achieve and I don't claim to either. Saying that a user buying a PC today will be satisfied with it 10 years down the road is not a stretch.
After building a new personal machine each year my old one gets either sold or given to family and friends. A result of this is that I've been able to verify that every one of my personal computers from 1998 on is still in use today. Every person I've been able to contact who I built a machine for is still using that machine or has a parent currently using it. They range from 266mhz Pentium II up until my most recent give away of an X2 3800 machine.
Strangely enough most are happy with what they have. We all know just because grandma thinks her machine is snappy doesn't mean it is. As an exercise I decided to make my rounds over the Christmas vacation to say hello and check on some of my old machines to see how they run.
My sister runs my old Athlon X2 3800 with 2GB of memory I built in 2005. I swear that thing is as fast than my Core 2 @ 3.4ghz when doing typical activities. Everything I do on my own machine, short of high res gaming, can be done on this.
Friend of mine runs a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB of memory I built for him around 2002. The fan on the CPU heat sink died almost 5 years ago and the side case fan has kept it cool. Email, spreadsheets, web surfing, etc runs fine. He even does some minor picture editing and is satisfied with it.
My mother runs an 800 mhz AMD Thunderbird I originally built in 2000. Since then I've taken it up to 1GB RAM, and replaced the hard drive. It has run Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, and now runs Windows XP. It's extremely usable for email, web
surfing, viewing pictures, etc. I could use this for the necessities no problem and do several times a year.
A friend's grandfather runs my very first computer I bought myself. 266mhz Pentium II running Windows 95. He plays solitare on it and wouldn't even let me open the case. Solitare was very playable and I left voluntarily before he chased me out. Whoever made that hard drive deserves a thank you.
I'm convinced. Unless ISPs start offering 10 gigbit internet service and solitare developes a memory leak a Nehalem along with a RAID set will last the every day man until 2029.
A friend asked me if it's possible to build him a computer that would last 10 years. I told him it was no problem. I'm sure there are few people today who are accurately predicting what the PC circa 2019 will be able to achieve and I don't claim to either. Saying that a user buying a PC today will be satisfied with it 10 years down the road is not a stretch.
After building a new personal machine each year my old one gets either sold or given to family and friends. A result of this is that I've been able to verify that every one of my personal computers from 1998 on is still in use today. Every person I've been able to contact who I built a machine for is still using that machine or has a parent currently using it. They range from 266mhz Pentium II up until my most recent give away of an X2 3800 machine.
Strangely enough most are happy with what they have. We all know just because grandma thinks her machine is snappy doesn't mean it is. As an exercise I decided to make my rounds over the Christmas vacation to say hello and check on some of my old machines to see how they run.
My sister runs my old Athlon X2 3800 with 2GB of memory I built in 2005. I swear that thing is as fast than my Core 2 @ 3.4ghz when doing typical activities. Everything I do on my own machine, short of high res gaming, can be done on this.
Friend of mine runs a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB of memory I built for him around 2002. The fan on the CPU heat sink died almost 5 years ago and the side case fan has kept it cool. Email, spreadsheets, web surfing, etc runs fine. He even does some minor picture editing and is satisfied with it.
My mother runs an 800 mhz AMD Thunderbird I originally built in 2000. Since then I've taken it up to 1GB RAM, and replaced the hard drive. It has run Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, and now runs Windows XP. It's extremely usable for email, web
surfing, viewing pictures, etc. I could use this for the necessities no problem and do several times a year.
A friend's grandfather runs my very first computer I bought myself. 266mhz Pentium II running Windows 95. He plays solitare on it and wouldn't even let me open the case. Solitare was very playable and I left voluntarily before he chased me out. Whoever made that hard drive deserves a thank you.
I'm convinced. Unless ISPs start offering 10 gigbit internet service and solitare developes a memory leak a Nehalem along with a RAID set will last the every day man until 2029.
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