As many OSNews readers forced to get by with ailing, slow computers at work may know, a stingy hardware upgrade cycle can have negagitve productivity effects. However, in this age of gigahertz processors, how often do businesses really need to upgrade? Every three to four years, a recent Gartner study recommends. Now, I’m sure Dell is happy to hear this news, but is it really necessary to upgrade that often?
I have my own computer, 1.2 GHz duron with 512 MB of RAM, with a 7200rpm Hard drive. You can get a picture of its speed. When I work, I have to use a 433 MHz Celeron with 64 MB of RAM. It feels frustrating, and even though I can work o nit, I coulf do some things faster with a faster PC, and would be happier too. Maybe I am used to a fast PC, but it can make a difference.
I think that upgrading should be about 2 years or when technology laps itself. What i mean by laps itself, is that we have 3ghz processors now, and that is what you have, then you should wait to get the 6ghz processor. By then technology has gone beyond what you can do with the 3ghz, and its time to upgrade. Something like that example.
I still use my dual Celeron 2×533 Mhz PC that I bought in 1999, as my main computer today.
It works perfectly and fast enough with my main OS.
Why would I want to upgrade before this PC becomes obsolete/dies? For a business, it might be a good idea to upgrade every 2-3 years, but on a household, if it works and does the job, there is no reason for replacement.
It all depends on what the PCs are used for – for example, if you’re stuck on Windows and Microsoft releases a new MS Office version that writes doc files incompatible with older Office releases and happens to use twice the CPU and RAM of previous Office releases, then eventually the *software* will force the hardware upgrade rather than the hardware needing to be swapped out because it’s about to collapse.
Of course, we all know that Linux can be used on older hardware more efficiently than Windows, but even recent Linux software (Open Office, Mozilla, KDE/Gnome) needs a fairly good spec machine (RAM is the most crucial element I usually find) to run sensibly. However, pretty well any P4-spec machine is good enough for the next 5 years, IMHO – consider increasing the RAM on the PC before ditching it…you might find your apps suddenly speed up dramatically with, say, double the RAM (and RAM is very cheap nowadays).
As my IP/domain name will attest, I work for the United States federal government. We currently use Dell Pentium III machines, 800 megahertz each with 256 megabytes of RAM. They were all bought and installed in September and October of 2000. When we were using Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 workstation and MS Office 97, it was just fine. However, since we upgraded all of our workstations to Windows 2000 Professional and Office XP back in May and June, the machines have been running like dogs. That is to say very very slowly.
It takes about double the amount of time it used to to finish logging on and actually be able to start getting some work done, and to log off and reboot the system at the end of the work day. Not to mention many of the applications we run are sluggish compared to when we were using Windows NT 4.
We need a hardware upgrade badly, but with our current budget and the spend-slashing trip President Bush has been taking, I doubt we’ll get new systems anytime soon.
well, in todays environment, I would say, no, you do not need to upgrade that often.
but I can recall backin the 100MHz or less years, that an upgrade to NT4 killed your work computer and slowed it to a crawl.
I was still working on one of those back in 2002!!!
Windows 2000 on a P3 800 mhz and 256 megs of RAM is slow ?! There is surely a problem man. One of my computer to work is a P3 450mhz with 192 megs of RAM and Windows 2000/Office XP and the speed is very good and on this same machine I’m running MySQL, IIS and a proxy. I think you should talk with your IT guys. Surely that they will come with a solution for you.
I have an almost-two-year-old Athlon XP 1700+ (that’s 1.45GHz) with 512 MB RAM at home that runs Linux only, and with each new version it gets faster. I can’t imagine *needing* to upgrade due to performance issues for at least another 3 years, but I want to sooner just to get away from AMD. Those Athlon XP processors throw off so much heat they require a jet engine to cool them. Seriously, my machine sounds like a hair dryer and throws off about as much heat. As soon as I can afford something better (Mac?) I’m done with that machine for good. Its performance is fine, but the noise is unbearable. Completely unacceptable considering the Dell P4 1.8GHz machine I have at work is so quiet I can’t even tell if it’s on and throws off no heat at all. I got burned big time by going with cheap hardware, and I won’t make that mistake again.
Honestly, there’s usually very little need to upgrade to new bloated software. What did Office XP offer that made it so compelling when 97 was doing the job just fine? If you *force* software upgrades, hardware upgrades must surely follow.
– File/FTP/Web Servers
– Firewalls (if you don’t have a dedicated hardware router)
– X Terminals connected to a bigger machine (I’ve got two of these at home, Pentium 166 and Pentium 2 300, connected to an Athlon 900 with 1GB of RAM, and the two X terminals are quite responsive – just make sure you have 100 Megabit ethernet)
I still use a PPro/200 with 64MB of RAM here at home (running OS/2 Warp 4), and I just did the first real hardware upgrade that this box has ever had — I added 128MB of EDO/ECC RAM, making the total 192MB, mainly because Mozilla was large enough that it caused my box to swap when I loaded it.
Other than that, I’m perfectly happy. Why? Because I use lightweight applications like Links, Yarn, and FileJet, mainly, with only a few larger apps (like StarOffice and Mozilla).
“Every three to four years, a recent Gartner study recommends.”
Thats great if you are a gamer but if you are a business that is a joke.
Windows 2000 starts up notoriously slowly. XP starts up faster, and so does 98. I haven’t used NT, but Windows 2000 is pretty slow, worse than any Linux box I have used.
Its performance is fine, but the noise is unbearable
AMD chips are not inherently noisier that any other processor.
The problem is that a lot of pc makers, especially the “white box” outlets, skimp on quality fans. The little sleeve bearing fans that spin at mach 8 are responsible for the hairdryer noise. A larger muffin fan can be had at most electronic stores and can be bodged onto the heatsink. They are slower, better for cooling and are much quieter.
AMD cheap?….are you kidding me??
I mean its there an easier chip to overclock and work on? š
I have to agree with the above post….its not the chip….its the case fans….heatsink….etc.
“Honestly, there’s usually very little need to upgrade to new bloated software. What did Office XP offer that made it so compelling when 97 was doing the job just fine? If you *force* software upgrades, hardware upgrades must surely follow.’
What do you consider bloat. Just being big doesn’t mean bloat. If it works perfect and gives me more useful things i’m fine. There are few things that are bloated to me. I really don’t care if something is huge. If it doesn’t run well, then thats a differant story, and even then it being big isnt an issue to me.
Office XP is very nice. Office 97 was rather flacky, especially on win98, if you had said office 2k, then maybe your point would be more valid. But still there was enough features to make it work it. The auto fixing/sugestion whatever you want to call it deal in XP is a nice new thing. Also it was simply visualy helped out. If you had 2k i wouldn’t suggest an upgrade unless if was just a matter of effort and cost was of no issue. If you had office 97 i would tell you to upgrade.
Well, ive got a decent machine, P4 2.0Ghz and 256MB of RAM.
But at work, we use 266Mhz w/ 64MB of RAM (some have 32MB). You’d think it’d annoy me, but it doesnt. All I do on it is spreadsheets and word processing (and internet) and the thing runs fine.
Thats what most of us do, and I wouldn’t recommend they upgrade their hardware (security updates are a different story). It works fine, and our budgets tight.
Technology is pushed onto us too much sometimes.
You can reduce the noise of our computer. Check out the Zallman cooling products. They offer a very efficent solution that includes slient fans.
Speed (like beauty) is in the eye of the beholder.
If it’s fast enough to do the job – then no worries. If it takes forever to do the job, time to upgrade/replace. It’s not rocket science, and with all the major vendors having price wars, it’s not all that expensive.
It’s only the Software that makes you upgrade your hardware. Our business switched to using Terminal Services. We only need to spend our money on servers like extra RAM. All our workstations are Pentiums.
The general business rule I use is to upgrade things when they get 4 times better. Here at my company, we are in the process of upgrading to 1.8 ghz – 2.2 ghz P4’s from Pentium 2 450’s. We could have upgraded to 1 ghz earlier, but the speed difference versus the cost would have hit our company extremely hard. With technology doubling every 18 months, it makes sense to wait 3 years and technology to quadruple before upgrading. That way you do not spend too much manpower upgrading systems, and too much money on technology purchases. Even at home, I have an AMD Athlon 1.2. I don’t plan to upgrade that until processors hit around 5 ghz. Then I’ll get a relatively cheap 4 ghz CPU.
I watched a demo where the fans were stripped off a running Pentium III, a Pentium 4, and an AMD Athlon XP. The Pentium III failed after a few minutes, the Pentium 4 continued just fine, and the AMD Athlon XP began to fry and sizzle. I agree a lot of it has to do with the quality of the fan, but even a quality fan can only be so quiet when it has to cool a frying-pan chip like that. Plus noise was only half of my complaint, the other half was the heat it throws off. It’s like a space heater in my small apartment.
I can’t even find a spot on my Dell P4 tower that’s even *slightly* warm to the touch (no exaggeration, the whole tower is room temperature) and it’s been on for weeks. That’s quality.
I recycled many Pentiums 1XX as X terminals of more powerfull computers and give it to secretaries and people who use computers to do very specific tasks.
In many Offices you can see people using brand-new Pentiums 4 with Winblows XP, M$ Office and a terminal emulator to access internal applications running in mainframes or Unix servers. It is a loss of money ! You can do the same with an older PC, Linux and OpenOffice for free !
The article talks morae about replacement then upgrade.
Our Apple two was upgradeable and tht’s why it lastet 9 years. My falcon wasn’t upgradeable eaasely so I replaced it with a p133 (which was put away three months ago after 7 years of services) and then a Bebox which lasted 4 years, In the end the OS was no more reponsive and eated mucho ram ,and most applicatiosn where x!Ā§ only
. I got a Mac for three years, I dream of updating it, but I don’t need to, so I don’t, I will not upgrade it.
For most bussiness it’s easier to replace than update (at least in large corps.).
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http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/
well, at work I have a Pentium 233 running win2k. Performace is somewhat good, as the main thing I do is ssh to a FreeBSD network, but running ClearCase and Mozilla is very slow. If I had a somewhat faster machine (450Mhz), I would work faster, but not much faster. Of course buying the latest Dell will not do much.
But really big ones. Sometimes you can have thousands of rows of entries, trying to work out very comlpex things. Large lookup tables, and calculating on each and every one. I had to turn off many things to get Excel useable on the machine. Otherwise it could take up to a minute recalculating. I know that maybe at times, it will be time to use a better tool, but the truth is, some of these tools can be so expensive, it really makes no sense to stick them in to an ancient PC because their cost can be far above that of a decent PC
No… It’s not the chip. I think you’re talking about the Tom’s Hardware video??
It’s not that the Intel processors are running cooler, it’s that they have intergrated thermal protection. If the processor gets too hot, it’ll slow down the processor until the temp is within a safe range. At least in the case of the P4 that’s true. The P3 just shuts itself down.
Now Athlon’s don’t have that kind of intergrated thermal protection. The Athlon XP do have some, but it has to be supported on the motherboard, and odds are it still won’t save the processor if it loses its heatsink.
This doesn’t mean that AMD is cheap or runs hotter. Actually some of the hottest processors around are the new Intel prescott core based ones. Those suckers are going to run VERY hot!
I’ve run both Intel and AMD processors here, and really I haven’t noticed any difference between the two in reliability and stability.
As for the original topic of this story… Three years sounds about right to me. The longest I ever kept a system was for six years, but that was due to economic reasons, when I can afford it, I upgrade.
So three years does seem like a good number to me.
It is necessasry to have people who have that cutting edge technology to enable the ones who can’t afford it to have good but cheap computers. If no one makes software to take advantage of the 3GHz monsters, then no one buys them, then Intel doesn’t produce faster chips, then prices of the slower chips don’t come down, and computers remain expensive. If people had though 600Kb was good for any man, how much would that cost right now.
“So three years does seem like a good number to me.”
to me too. I don’t know about other countries, but here in Germany, three years happens to be the time in which you can write these things off, tax-wise.
BTW: Guys and Girls – we are _geeks_ here, folks. The right answer to “when to upgrade” for us should be “as soon as I sold all my other belongings to buy this shiny new CPU/board/GCard/whatever” š
regards,
Stephan
so the question is this: how much did dell or someone else pay gartner to write that. Incidentally, most of the whitepapers and a lot of those “studies” are sponsored.
My Windows desktop blazes. It’s a 500Mhz machine. It runs NT 4. It replaced a 486 66 DX2 running NT 3.51.
My QNX machine is fine. It’s a 233Mhz.
Many of the desktops in my company are 333Mhz, they are wickedly fast. They run Windows 95.
My NeXT box runs like lightning on a 200Mhz Pentium.
My 133Mhz laptop is quite adequate running a Windows 95/98 blend. OpenOffice.org opens a little slowly though.
If you slather every time some software company is in need of a cash injection, so releases a new version, then you are simply an upgrading idiot.
I will admit, I’ve got some faster (1-2+Ghz) machines around but they are “toys”, playthings I take apart, break out the soldering iron, and put back together for a few days. I don’t NEED them or even use them nearly as much as the machines that are too old to benefit from further tweaking.
The only reason I “upgraded” my laptop from a 486 was because I couldn’t get batteries for it anymore.
Oh, I have NEVER seen XP boot faster than 2K on the same machine, or faster than any other version of Windows (not having ever tried ME), but I can show you a Pentium 75 that takes 20 seconds to go from “Starting Windows 95…” to the login dialog window, yes it’s severely tweaked (and stable), but it demonstrates there is NO real innovation or progress from Wintel.
Up until this spring, I was running Debian Linux as number of servers on a 25mhz Mac LCIII (12mb ram, 160mb disk, 10mb ethernet, no cd).
That computer was made in 1993, and though its been beat up, dropped, and gone through some unbelievable software damage, it still ran fine until I moved its functionality to one of the other servers.
Why don’t we ask the users?
Its relatively easy to put up a webform that pulls its info from a database of all your users and all their computer systems to allow them to choose when and what systems they want to have upgraded.
If you don’t already have this database what are you thinking? That this stuff manages itself?
I think most companies need to send their managers back to calculus class so they can learn how to do these things in real-time.
First you say it’s not the chip, then you go on to talk about how the reason the P4 throws off less (virtually no) heat is because of thermal protection built into the chip…hmmm.
It is not the clock frequency that matters, nor the amount of RAM or which OS you might run. It is the needs of the users, which should be obvious.
Person one might be fine with the same computer that person two is not. Is person two then insane or just plain power hungry? Well, maybe, but not always.
Problems arise when you have to wait a lot. If I can cut my compile/debug cycles by 5% (I won’t get anything else done after all. Only an idiot would think that spare minutes here and there can stack up to something useful (other than online comics
) it can save a company more than the cost of a computer fairly quick. If I can cut it with 50% (large projects) all of a sudden I can save it within a month. Especially since most projects don’t plan properly and want everything yesterday…
This thing comes up all the time. “Do you really need a Pentium 90? There is enough speed in my trusty 386”. We have heard it time after time again. Those who don’t want to upgrade, don’t, but enough companies/people do upgrade. I don’t think it will stop anytime soon. There is a huge different between a new top of the line computer, and something from two years ago. And as long as I have to wait, software and hardware is too slow, and I will want something faster. To be honest, the only real stop I have is the fact that I don’t have any money. If I made more money I’d buy a new computer every 12 months or less.
Isn’t it obvious? I think Gartner is largely owned by integral capital management, which in turn is largly owned by msft. Something like that.
My old 100MHz 486 with 8mb of ram booted up Windows 3.11FW faster than a newer computer does with WindowsXP. An early 1990s Mac LC2 boots up faster than a new Mac with MacOSX. The real issue with older hardware ‘costing’ businesses time and money is the huge software boat so you now have OSes needing 100mb+ after bootup so the user can do the exact same tasks they would on their on mid 1990s computer at the speed of usability.
New hardware uses far more electricity to, which is a serious cost to business. ‘Upgrading’ from P2 350s with Win98SE to HT P4s would massively increase a business’s electricity bill for little real-world improvement in their computing environment.
Sure you may say, it is an advantage to upgrade, but computers aren’t being recycled to any reasonable degree, and the scale of wastage of earth’s natural resources is awesome. What is next, throwaway houses?
Well, ive got a decent machine, P4 2.0Ghz and 256MB of RAM.
But at work, we use 266Mhz w/ 64MB of RAM (some have 32MB). You’d think it’d annoy me, but it doesnt. All I do on it is spreadsheets and word processing (and internet) and the thing runs fine.
Thats what most of us do, and I wouldn’t recommend they upgrade their hardware (security updates are a different story). It works fine, and our budgets tight.
Technology is pushed onto us too much sometimes.
About the only thing I would suggest there is upgrading the memory. Assuming it uses good-old-fashion DIMMS, you could easily upgrade them to either 128 or 256 and squeeze a few more years out of it. Ultimately, in terms of processing power, it only really helps if you are running processor (mainly FPU based) heavy stuff, things like wordprocessors are pretty light and the extra memory will alow smoother multi-tasking.
I can tell you that NT 4.0 with office-97 is very snappy on a 120mhz Pentium with 64MB or RAM.
What business function can you not do on such a machine?
The thing that slows up computing way more than anything else is internet connection speed. Nothing to do with CPU speed.
You don’t seem to understand what the P4 thermal protection does…the P4 still throws off a lot of heat(I think the latest 3.2GHz is ~80W), but when the thermal diode on the chip hits ‘X’ or higher degrees, the CPU starts modulating the internal core clock in order to cool down. This is only meant as a stop-gap measure(they assume you’ll only be at ‘X’ temp for very short periods of time), your cpu will still be damaged if you don’t use a good heatsink and fan.
If your Dell P4 doesn’t feel warm, it says more to the design of the Dell cooling system than the P4.
A 3 year replacement cycle is very common. I doubt that Gartner is recommending this because they’re owned by Microsoft (they’re not).
We use a 3 year replacement cycle where I work for a number of reasons. One, after 36 months, the PCs are fully depreciated. Second, the number of support calls begins to increase dramatically after 36 months. Third, we’re not a technology company. We’re a small non-profit focused on serving our members. I like it when my users don’t notice the technology. When it starts to die, they notice it. We budget for 1/3 of our PCs every 3 years and it’s worked out very well for us.
Of course, I do sometimes extend the replacement cycle for low use PCs.
In former positions, we also used a 36 month replacement cycle for all PCs.
Sure — a 233 could do the job, but at what cost?
Scott
For a business I would stay away from white-box systems and stick with a Dell or other major brand. Stability, warranty and support are better. Speed is the last consideration and is not usually an issue in the age of GHZ processors.
The OS is pretty much tied to the box so upgrading every four years sounds pretty cost effective with systems costing less the next time you buy them and having a new OS and apps tossed in without the licensing hassles.
have a 700 mhz machine still running using Red Hat Linux 9 as well as a 366mhz running Red Hat 9 and still humming along and they both work very well.
I agree Gartner is not owned by Microsoft. However, they have released study results in the past, and the studies turned out to be funded by Microsoft. They are not owned; they are heavily indentured.
Another good reason for the 3 year replacement is quite simple; leasing. The last three companies I worked for (JD Edwards, Qwest Communications, Symantec) all leased the majority of their computers. The leases were quite ordinary and were standardized at three years. The Business Reasons were; lowered accounting and real property management, better maintenance and support at a lower cost, and guaranteed upgrades. At the end of the lease period, the company just got a new computer (top o’ the line) with a new lease.
Software was a standardized package with different departments with specific needs purchasing their own additional software.
The last company for which I contracted had a similar lease. The first month I was there I had a P-III 266 running Windows 2000. The following month I got a new P-IV 2 Gig system that was downgraded to Windows XP. Reason was the end of a three year lease.
‘Nuff said!!!
What I read it just a press release. How can I get the actual study report so that I/we can get a better understanding. To those who get his hand on the actual report, could any of you provide the details of sampling such as user group (i.e. business/personal/education), usage category etc.
A plain write up like the link just misleading and give a lot of different interpretation. Like me, in my office (aside from the server) we only got 1 nos of Pentium 4 1.8 GHz (supposed to be fastest here but unluckily I think the IT boys just set it up wrongly so that it run Win XP like a tortoise, about tha same responsiveness of my Fujitsu Crusoe 2110), a few Dell 120 MHz, 350 MHz and mine are Dell 733 MHz which serve as a a desktop and server for highway traffic management data. Anyway in contras to Gartner, oour staff downtime due to old hardware are negligible since their lost time is more on other things.
At home I got 1 GHz PEntium III, slow Fujitsu Crusoe 2110 and AMD 1.4 GHz. The most productive computer is the laptop since that is the most used computer at home. So if gartner take me as respondent, I’m not affected by the age of computers hardware.
This is an interesting question.
I currently have a Dual P3 500 Coppermine chipset running my website, at the moment, which runs my Java servlet based XML relationalized parallel mysql/oracle 9i database publishing cluster I built using my favorite integrated java development environment Eclipse.
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My Laptop is a Sager 3 Gigahertz, but that is because I run a lot of gui tools for development work. The server with the dual processors also has a 1GIG of ram, and dual SCSI drives.
The server is based on the intel BX chipset and is quite old.
It runs marvelously.
What I find, is that marvelous turns to outstanding when I put the new 2.6 test5 kernel on the thing, where I ran everything for a day.
WOW! Much better response time. Talk about breathing new life into old hardware, kernel 2.6 certainly does that on dual processor systems, at least on mine anyway.
Preliminary Java benchmarks are up almost 20% on transaction rates with MySQL when I run the publishing engine file system I built.
Very nice all you Kernel 2.6 developers that worked on the new threading and scheduler code…
I now have an extra 2-3 years worth of good solid work I can get out of this machine, just with a OS kernel upgrade.
Do THAT on a Windows machine.
Phhhhhhhhhhhhfffft!
-gc
We currently use Dell Pentium III machines, 800 megahertz each with 256 megabytes of RAM. They were all bought and installed in September and October of 2000. When we were using Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 workstation and MS Office 97, it was just fine. However, since we upgraded all of our workstations to Windows 2000 Professional and Office XP back in May and June, the machines have been running like dogs.
The office workers at my father’s company uses Pentium II CPUs with around 64-128 MB of RAM, and they run just fine. We take them down each weekend to install upgrades and patches, and then we leave them logged in and running all week long. They take several minutes to boot up, but once they are up that’s it for the week. No slowdowns, no crashes, no reboots, no logoffs, no security problems.
It takes about double the amount of time it used to to finish logging on and actually be able to start getting some work done, and to log off and reboot the system at the end of the work day. Not to mention many of the applications we run are sluggish compared to when we were using Windows NT 4.
WINDOWS_KEY + L
Works like a charm on Windows XP. It keeps all my programs loaded in memory. On Windows 2000 you can do the same thing by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL to open Task Manager and then selecting Options/Lock Computer to lock the computer. We do this with the PCs at work.
We need a hardware upgrade badly, but with our current budget and the spend-slashing trip President Bush has been taking, I doubt we’ll get new systems anytime soon.
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I have heard many politicians and pundits complaining about having to spend money on the war (even though many are in favor of new domestic spending that would cost many times more each and every year), but I have not heard people complaining about Bush being too thrifty. Our chances of hearing that on NPR would be like Bill Gates taking a vow of poverty, RMS being hired as the new CEO of Microsoft Corp., both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden surrending, me winning a $10,000,000 sweepstakes, and a cure for cancer being discovered all on the exact same day.
Those Athlon XP processors throw off so much heat they require a jet engine to cool them. Seriously, my machine sounds like a hair dryer and throws off about as much heat.
Heh, try putting three AMD boxes in a small room plus a loud air conditioning system. Ouch! Those closed ear headphones work wonders, though.
“Every three to four years, a recent Gartner study recommends.”
Thats great if you are a gamer but if you are a business that is a joke.
Actually, I think it is a very good policy. People seem to think that when a business buys new PCs, they have to buy the best, but often it makes much more sense to buy used machines that are just coming off leases. My Dad’s work used 166 MHz Pentiums (also some 200’s with MMX) and 32 or 64 MB RAM with originally came with Windows 95/98 installed. Once we put Windows 2000 on those machines, they were very, very slow! The company recently replaced them with a couple of very cheap Pentium II’s and upped the RAM. Buying used PCs every few years is a great way to save money on hardware and still have a valid support contract to fix problems for you.
Oh, I have NEVER seen XP boot faster than 2K on the same machine, or faster than any other version of Windows (not having ever tried ME)
XP is much faster with regardes to boot-up times. Windows 2000 has horrible boot-up times on the *same* *hardware*. When I upgraded to Windows XP on this machine I was amazed at how much the startup times increased, and this was true of the other machines I have upgraded.
Regarding X terminals, which DE do your users run Gnome or KDE? (Or another WM?)…I’m asking because one thing I have yet to figure out is how to have network transparent sound (i.e. the client can play sounds through his machine). I’ve heard esd can do it, but I haven’t been successful and there’s not a lot of documentation about this.
I mean, a decent PC will cost you like $400, or even less. If you are paid like 30000 per year, your productivity is FAR more important than the cost saving from keeping an old PC. At home yes maybe you do not value your own time that much, but in a working environment. At the sort of money above, over three years the company will pay you 225 times the amount they spend on the hardware with a 3 year upgrade cycle. Factor in increases issues with older machines, and upgrading is a no brainer. I do not hold Gartner in the highest respect, but I think sometimes businesses DO know what they are doing.
And yes I know that some people do not get that much money, but even if you earned half that, Its still a factor of a hundred, and you can get cheaper pc’s still.
PCs are dirt cheap so there is no point keeping them for a long time. I knew a head of a university department who was running a Mac Classic as late at 1997. He only used it for email but it was still slow and the 10″ screen was useless.
My brother works as a surveyor. His organisation replaces their whitebox PCs every 12 months – six months after purchase they often get CPU/RAM upgrade. The reality is a reasonably fast machine for 2D drafting only costs AU$1500 and time saved pays for it self very quickly- probably only a few weeks.
You don’t always need the latest and greatest – but a pentium 90 with 16 meg RAM running Windows 95 isn’t a cost saver for business users.
I don’t understand when people say they need to upgrade everytime a new processor is out there. We have systems which we bought in 1999. Compaq Systems with 733 Mgz PIII with 128 MB RAM and 10 GB harddisk. All my apps work fine.. I use Eclipse for my java development, Office 2003 Beta, running on my Windows XP. I don’t see any problem. XP works just great.. now as i am typing this on my Mozilla Firebird(Great app), i have
Eclipse
Acrobat
Two Terminal services client,
Word 2003
Outlook 2003
Moziall Firebird
3 Explorer Windows
One VSS Window
Winmerge (great again )
Task manager
Norton Antivirus corporate version
My Task manager says currently allocated VM is 329 MB. But still its quite acceptable. I don’t face any frustrating moments barring when eclipse holds up running GC. I feel i can use this baby for another 2 years. I rarely see more then 20% CPU utilization unelss Norton antivirus is scanning.
I think its better to add more RAM which would give couple of years more life to any system.
Gubol
>>I knew a head of a university department who was running a Mac Classic as late at 1997.
Heh, either you’re not the only one, or we are thinking of the same Mac Classic.
I am setting a a VERY OLD PC for a brother-in-law to learn Windows on. It is a 486SX66 w/16M RAM & 400M HD.
Yes, that’s right. I was actually able to squeeze Win95b, Word 2000 and Excel 2000 onto it. It runs just a bit slower than a PC I have running WinXP & Office XP on a 1.6G Athlon w/512M RAM and 80G HD.
Hmm…. makes you think – is it all just sloppy patches and app-welding causing that zero-sum gain in performance?!?
Some have the $ for hardware….. I prefere gooooood software…
So… I have an Athlon 500, 768Mb M, Radeon 9000… and
2.6.0-test5-mm2
sure kernel compiles in 30minutes, but in that time I can “write a CD and play Enemy Territory at 1024×768 res.” But I have 3-4 500-1000Mhz computers… nice for clusters 
– in the future I think I’ll experiment… only for fun, not that my 500Mhz athlon is slow…..
Upgrade…. I think I’ll start writing a new scheduler… KDE 3.2 and 4.0 is comming.
If most of you follow what Gartner suggest, I’m willing enough to receive your “obsolete” hardware so that I can arrange for free/almost free installation at community center… If not I can still sell it here at a good price.. heh… he….he…
As an IT helpdesk – the only machines in my company that cause me no problems are the Dell Dimension P-2 towers we bought in 1998
Everything else flakes out sooner or later – including the brand new Precision and Optiplex P4 workstations š They seem prone to network card and video driver issues.
Win2K will run happily on anything down to 200mhz given enough RAM – if bootup time is an issue then dont turn it off !
Not the other way around.
IT isn’t a means by itself, it is a tool to make business, more business and better business. If your software isn’t progressing as you do business, then there is little need for any upgrade.
Software upgrades are the ones that motivate the new hardware needs. Are you sure you get a benefit when upgrading a software? Just because a software house releases a new version of a program that isn’t a motive to upgrade it. Wristles and bells and eye candy are all over now in software industry… real value isn’t.
In a business prespective, everything should be planed acording with the needs, not acording to external “proposals” of the suppliers (unless they add to the business advantages, but that is another case).
My 2cents…
The Gartner study is available for US $95. Since I don’t want to cough up that money, the following comments are based on conjectures, not on what the study actually said.
I can get more performance from my old PC if I upgrade the RAM and the hard drive, instead of buying a new box. The RAM may be difficult to find or too expensive for a ridiculous capacity (things like $100 for 16 MB of SIMM). The hard drive is easier to change, unless its interface is too old.
I don’t understand why this 3-year upgrade cycle is portrayed as some kind of law of Physics ? If Windows is not part of the picture, then that cycle may be longer than thought.
Let’s take two graphics artists, for instance. The first one uses NetBSD and the GIMP; the second relies on Windows 2000 and Photoshop. Now, can we really say these two have to upgrade their computers after the same number of years ? I doubt it.
In another domain, programming, Theo de Raadt gives (on his personal web site) the following configuration as his test machine : Pentium 120 MHz, 32 MB of RAM and a 2 GB hard disk. This was built circa 1995 (according to the May 2000 issue of Maximum PC magazine) yet it is still used today to produce a reliable and modern OS.
One area that is seldom mentioned in forums is that people may use a server as their main workstation. Let me explain myself, before you flame me. On auction sites, old servers are listed at decent prices. Since these were built tough, they certainly may handle the same load as desktops sold two or three years later. Therefore, why not buy one of those, instead of a spanky new PC ?
Last point, related to the previous, free software is the way to go. Grab an old Sun Ultra or an SGI box, install a free OS on it and you can tell the Dell or HP salesman to go to…, well, you know, that hot and smelly place where sinners are supposed to go š
Old hardware? Theoretically anything over 4 years old is “old”.. My 20y/o 2800baud modem still works perfectly. So do all my 8088’s and *gasps* my IBM PS/30’s. At work we have two of the earlier AS/400 models, and they work like a charm. They’ve been there for over 15 years. We recently had a little chat with Sun and IBM to upgrade .. and to be honest, I’m not going to spend 15kUSD (or more!) just to replace 2 AS/400’s so I can get my billing done in 1 hour instead of 12 hours .. It’s a nice weekend processing job. So seriously, who cares whether something takes time?
Of course hardware does break down (very very very rarely in my case), in which case you might as well buy a bit of new hardware. I however fail to see why on earth one should buy a 3Ghz P4 to replace a broken down P133mhz ..
Shawna wrote:
Plus noise was only half of my complaint, the other half was the heat it throws off. It’s like a space heater in my small apartment.
I have to agree with her, with my brothers Athlon 1.2Ghz, it is effectively cooled, but the hot air that gets pushed out of the case actually heats up my brothers bedroom. The summer is unbearable, but Winter is good
(Okay I am exaggerating about Winter, it doesn’t get that hot).
My younger sisters still use a P100. It runs windows 95 (with all patches). I have them set up with kmeleon as the browser, eudora for email and openoffice for word-processing. no virus scanner. it works great. this machine is 8 years old.
I know this is pointed towards business, which may not upgrade as often as some home users (noted exceptions: my aunt, until recently, was running Win 3.1, all of us know someone that fits that mold). However, a 4 year upgrade cycle is not the best news for Dell, who would probably prefer a faster upgrade cycle, like 2 years.
Until a year or so ago, when the corporate office forced our division to replace all of our computers, our division was spending a very large amount of money supporting old computers. Some of the computers were far less than 4 years old, yet since they had been acquired on a fairly strict budget, were nowhere near the top of the line for the year they were built (for example, a 400 MHz Celeron was purchased 3 years ago and replaced a little over a year ago). Additionally, even though every Dell shipped with Windows XP installed, XP was just (in the last 3 months) approved for our network, so the majority of the computers had XP removed once they arrived and 2000 or 98SE installed. While the hardware may be new, no one’s rushing on OS upgrades around here.
Anyway, to get back to my original point, 4 year old technology may be useful today for business if it was good technology at the time, but usually it just ends up costing the business more money in support. I’d say that anyone with better than a 1GHz processor and a good amount of RAM won’t have to upgrade for a long while, but just as I thought my 600MHz P3 at home (4 years ago) was going to be good enough for a while, I’m not going to bet on it. There are many people working here that get by with old computers all the time, and always have. That doesn’t mean it’s cost efficient for the company to keep even those people on a 5-6 year upgrade cycle. As for myself, the longer I go between upgrades the longer my work takes, as I can only do so much to speed up a compile without an upgrade.
I had the same problem of a real loud fan, it is the cheap fan, get a ball bearing fan with a 100% copper heat sink. It will be quieter and smaller. I was able to reduce my fan noise to where I can fall asleep next to my computer – I have an AMD XP2000+. Some computer shops you can plug in the fan and listen to how loud it is before buying it.
I use a pentium 1 200mhz windows 98 it gets me by just fine.
I knew one business that reinstalled windows 3.1 onto a pentium 2 300 they had it on a 386 an hard drive was making noise the reason for windows 3.1 was they had a data milling program that cost over $2000.00 the company who made the program had gone out of business an thats all the computer does is run that program