Computers = a Bottomless Money Pit?
I've been building PC's ever since I got my first 486 about 15 years ago. That little beast was running an AMD 486DX 40 MHz chip on a VLB motherboard with 4 Megs of RAM and it was all nicely packed in a large AT tower case (mind you, I still have that case). My first real upgrades were a VESA Local Bus EIDE hard drive controller card and a Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB video card. I still remember the performance boost I got out of that HDD controller. It took a bit under 10 seconds to start Windows 3.11 CE and I considered that lightning fast. As years progressed I've owned four other computers which means each got about three years of use in average.
Since I couldn't afford to buy a new PC every year, I upgraded a lot. The reason I did that was gaming and the fact that I liked to fiddle with computer parts. Ofcourse most of the upgrades involved replacing the CPU, adding memory or/and replacing the graphics card. Over the years I spent quite an impressive sum of money on upgrades but I also pretty much maxed out each PC before moving on to the new one. Was it worth it? Well, yes and no. The problem is it never ends. In order to play the latest games, you have to upgrade your PC all the time. Sooner or later you come to the point where you need a whole new computer because the platforms change and the cycle starts over. This is as true today as it was then.
My current system is about 4 years old and as much as I'd like to build a new one, I don't really have to. During the last year or so I virtually stopped playing games effectively eliminating the need to upgrade. I'm still running Windows XP and this hardware allows me to do everything I need at the moment. The fact is, latest hardware (Core Duo etc.) is an absolute overkill for most home and office users who use the PC for web surfing, e-mail, movies and MS Office. It's kind of pointless, isn't it? All those CPU cycles going to waste...
Since I couldn't afford to buy a new PC every year, I upgraded a lot. The reason I did that was gaming and the fact that I liked to fiddle with computer parts. Ofcourse most of the upgrades involved replacing the CPU, adding memory or/and replacing the graphics card. Over the years I spent quite an impressive sum of money on upgrades but I also pretty much maxed out each PC before moving on to the new one. Was it worth it? Well, yes and no. The problem is it never ends. In order to play the latest games, you have to upgrade your PC all the time. Sooner or later you come to the point where you need a whole new computer because the platforms change and the cycle starts over. This is as true today as it was then.
My current system is about 4 years old and as much as I'd like to build a new one, I don't really have to. During the last year or so I virtually stopped playing games effectively eliminating the need to upgrade. I'm still running Windows XP and this hardware allows me to do everything I need at the moment. The fact is, latest hardware (Core Duo etc.) is an absolute overkill for most home and office users who use the PC for web surfing, e-mail, movies and MS Office. It's kind of pointless, isn't it? All those CPU cycles going to waste...
Just in case you were wondering, my current rig is:
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP2400+ Barton Mobile
TwinMOS Twister Pro 2x512MB PC3200 CL2
120GB Seagate Barracuda SATA
ATI All-in-wonder 9800Pro
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