taltamir, good points and anecdote. I certainly agree that people should be smart enough to vote with their wallets
by doing business with the better companies and selecting quality products.
I don't advocate people falling for the "elite" expensive and "fashionable" things that are needlessly gilt, but it is just
wrong that you can't get a nice simple middle of the road product and have it last years.
We've created such a disposable product acceptance in society that we're ruining the very planet we live on by
needlessly overconsuming junk that we're trained (or forced) to throw out after less than a couple of years.
It is almost literally impossible to buy something like a blender or vacuum cleaner in the US that works well and
ruggedly even compared to many of the simplistic designs of 50 years ago.
Concerning warranty length, granted, given Moore's law, 3 years is am ample time for many people to expect to keep and use a high end video card but consider that it isn't something small and discrete like a CPU chip or DIMM. It is probably
the most heavy and resource consumptive product in your PC. It has a couple of pounds of copper, aluminium
heatsinks, many complex semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, a very large PCB, lots of custom made plastic, et. al.
It is probably just as resource comsumptive in its manufacture as your motherboard, RAM, CPU, and maybe PC chassis
combined. Given the multi-hundred million transistor count, it is also much more complex than your CPU.
Thus to just trash it in 1-2 years is really quite an extreme waste of resources. Granted it won't be high end,
but I'd expect it to be fully *usable* for a general purpose PC even for 5-10 years, such that you could give
the PC and video card to your kids or donate it to charity or for an educational or library usage or such after using
it for 2-3 years yourself and still have it produce value for someone.
Beyond that, I'd certainly hope for (and deplore the lack of) an excellent "take back" program as exists in some places
in the EU where a manufacturer must provide for specialized recycling of any electronics product they sell and make
it cost-free for the consumer to ship that old / broken / unwanted product to the most specialized recycling facility
when it is time for that. To think of all the billions of often perfectly functional or at least recyclable old motherboards,
cell phones, peripheral cards, hard discs, et. al. just sitting in landfills polluting the environment with solder and heavy metals and plastic compounds when so many people in underdeveloped countries don't even have access to
libraries, books, computers at all is not right.
I'm still sitting on a couple of old AGP GPUs that I'd like to see put to good use, though it is getting hard to economically
buy an low end AGP motherboard to make any use of them. I suppose I'll take them down to the local PC electronics
recycler organization so that they can cobble together a fully usable system with them for some good purpose.
Sure I don't need them any more, but I'd be disappointed with the wastefulness if they didn't work and get used for
something. I suppose I'd draw the line when the energy cost to run something for a year exceeds the
purchase price of a better / greener technology item to replace it, then it is time for recycling.
P) 2900pro [the Pro o/c's to xt; 256bit/512MB] both for sale .. cheap .. as i have 4870 waiting for 4870x2
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