I would like a new desktop PC. I do not have a good reason for this. I have a little bit of a reason, which is that the desktop we have, which is all of three years old, is for some reason getting really slow. I don't think its just perception; I think it truly is. Not as slow as my Win2K PC was, or Win98, but still: slow.
So, which one?
I am emotionally against getting Vista, because it sounds like they've sold their souls for DRM. Which is odd, because I don't download music, and few videos, so the odds of me being affected by this are slim. But still: there is a fair amount of press that makes me think (shudder) when I think of it. Plus, I hate the idea of having to get a gihugic machine just to get Vista to run at all, plus, to get all of the niftiness that they advertise, you need the top of the line Vista, and a TRULY big machine -- say, eight to ten thousand megawatts of power, and thats just the screensaver. Neither of these is all that appealing, and in concert, as appealing as congealed lard.
I am intellectually for getting Linux, because it isn't Windows, until I read a site where a guy talked about all he had to do to get a Linux machine working, the bottom line of which was, it was a freakin' LOT of work, but he really really enjoyed it, and if you like going deep into the innards of an operating system, you would, too.
I am emotionally for getting a Mac, because I have been seduced by the image of Macs as cool and sleek and all of that, though I am sure they are not THAT amazingly good, and I am sure they have their own why the hell did they do it THAT way??? moments. Plus, there'd be the learning curve, and the question of connecting it to our home network. Doable, but at what cost? And lets not forget the gihugic price of Macs, too -- three or four times the cost of a WinBox (though, if you're talking Vista Deathstar version, maybe only twice). And what of the sunk monies in our existing software -- how much Apple-specific stuff would be needed? Of course, we could get the Parallels package to let us run Windows appls under the Mac....Argh, another money pit...
So I dunno. But this going to take some thinking.... Fortunately, we have time. Sites like this one help.
2 comments:
As for new computers, between us being gamers and me doing alot of graphic stuff with photos and home video's, we have those big honking machines that cost us an arm and a leg.
What we've learned over the years is to spend more when buying one so they will last longer. We basically have them built so they will work with upcoming technology we know is on the horizon and we go heavy on processing speed. Everything else we need, like RAM and Graphic Cards can be added to/updated as time goes on. Both of our machines should last at least 5-6 years, which in the gaming world is like
dinosaurs walking the earth.
Oh and I can't stand Vista. My husband's new machine has it and I still haven't been able to get it to network with mine. I still can't use my printer because of it ugh.
I think your approach makes a lot of sense. I know that its difficult to estimate how much capacity you need, so you have to focus on the stuff that can't easily be upgraded. (Whatever happened to the 'zero insertion force' cpu chip concept?). And comparing one machine to another is tough. Professionally, I routinely see computer performance people using a standard known as 'MIPS' (Millions of instructions per second') as the way of comparing the capacity of mainframe computers. The cognoscienti scorn this, saying that MIPS is old news, and then some; you should use (insert the measurement-d'jour here). And they may well be right. But people like me KNOW what MIPS means, and though it may not be accurate, its 'good enough'. Similarly, I know that the primary determinant of computer performance is disk IO; the less you do, the better off you are. Compute-intensive applications are not as rare as they used to be (graphics and gaming are big compute users) but for most apps, compute power isn't that big a deal. Getting a two gigahertz processor doesn't give twice the performance of a one gigahertz processor. Better? Sure. Twice? Not likely. But try to get a PC seller to say in laymans terms that this PC does its IO better than that PC. (And lets not get into 'what do you mean by BETTER'?)
I am getting closer to getting a Mac with Parallels desktop. I still think its a bad move, but I don't think its AS bad a move as I used to.
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