

How Old Is Your Work Computer?   - bootload
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/11/14/how-old-is-your-work-computer/

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gaius
Computers don't get _slower_. A computer that did the job 10 years ago can
still do the job today. I'd happily be using the same Sun Ultra 1 I had on my
desk in 1997 today if I could, and it could do everything I need to do
perfectly well. Maybe the silver lining of this recession will be to teach
people that they really can step off the treadmill and the sky won't fall in.

~~~
Herring
In a sense they do become too slow. After using newer stuff, you begin to
expect faster performance. I remember being quite satisfied with my previous
laptop till I started using the newer dual core stuff.

~~~
gaius
That is true, but the volume of useful work that can be done on a computer
doesn't decrease; the slowness is almost always in the user interface portion,
not the computation.

Obviously this is different in fields were people actually are constrained by
their processors and staying on the cutting edge is a competitive advantage.
We have a couple of apps like that (e.g. Monte Carlo simulations where we can
basically eat as much power as we can get) but for most people (including me),
most of the time, computers became "good enough" for work on the desktop 10-15
years ago.

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gamble
And hence the reason why Vista hasn't met sales expectations. Most office PCs
are single-purpose email-and-word-processing terminals. Why upgrade if XP and
Office are getting the job done?

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manny
My work "PC" is a Dell Insprion 1501 laptop with a blazingly fast (/sarcasm)
AMD sempron 1800 with 256M RAM.

Does everything I need it to. Then again, I run dwm and only terminal apps
save for firefox...

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vegai
About a year old rather generic Fujitsu-Siemens + about 3 months old Acer
Aspire One.

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socratees
my work pc is a dell optiplex gx270 2.6 GHz with 1 gig ram.

