US sales of computers carrying Microsoft's new operating system Vista soared in the week after it was launched, defying the expectations of analysts who gave Vista lackluster reviews. Personal computer sales for the week following Vista's debut to succeed Microsoft's Windows XP in January were 67 percent higher than those in the same week in 2006, and nearly triple those of the preceding week, according to Current Analysis.
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Member since:2005-07-02
I agree, that's hardly what I'd call an "old PC"...my "old" PC is a Pentium 166 (web server/firewall), my "middle-aged" PC is an Athlon 900, 80MB HD, 1GB RAM, my "young adult" laptop is a Turion64, 1.6GHz...
The PC industry is very consumerist, with hardware becoming "obsolete" very quickly. It's always been that way, driven mostly by games...Vista is part of this. Dell and other PC makers hope it will make people buy new PCs so they can use all its bells and whistles. MS doesn't have a choice, it has to guarantee a revenue stream or it will collapse.
I'm not sure how much longer this industry can continue to function like this. There are already signs that it is losing some steam...I think this is a good opportunity for alternate OSes. Linux, among others, may benefit from the fact that it can already offer a fine desktop experience on what people here would consider old hardware (with Beryl running fine on older 3D hardware for eye candy buffs).
Member since:2005-11-16
I can see how games drive upgrading in the home market, but I can never understand why so many companies feel the need to upgrade all their computers very couple of years. Often there's nothing wrong with the existing machines, and any productivity boost from the faster computers is offset by all the time wasted by inevitable problems with the new systems.
For example, my office has just finished throwing away the last of their old P4 systems. Most were replaced with new Athlon 64X2 hardware last year, but 2.4Ghz 256Mb RAM P4s were still used in the company call centre.
Obviously with that little RAM they would be useless for Vista, and pretty painful running Office 2003 on XP, but all they were used for was call logging and accessing a database. There was no analysis of whether much faster computers are actually needed for the task, the P4s were a few years old so they go in the trash. I imagine the call centre people will be enjoying Vista eye candy on their PCs in a few months, while essentially using them as simple terminals.
That isn't an isolated case, everywhere I've worked seems to have the same kind of wasteful policy. I suppose if the IT department didn't keep trying to fix things that aren't broken they'd be out of a job...
Member since:
2006-04-06
it's 275gb raid 0 sata II, geforce 6800gtx (256mb) P4@3ghz and 1gb ram.
You call that an "old PC"?..
The PC I'm using right now is 700MHz, 256MB. Almost as fast as your videocard