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Jul. 22nd, 2009 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienIn a way, I miss the days when each successive computer was several times faster than its predecessor of a few years earlier.
My first PC was a 25MHz 386 in 1992/3; the next was a 120MHz Pentium in 1997; after that came a 700Mz Pentium 3 desktop and 650MHz laptop in 2000, and then a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 laptop in 2004, though that was heavier than I'd have preferred. Back then, the steady increase in clock speed, as well as memory and disk space, seemed as inevitable as mass-market edition following hardcover.
Then things changed. In 2006 it was next to impossible to find a laptop at any size with a clock speed over 2GHz. (Considering how hot and bulky my poor old Behemoth is at 2.8, I wasn't too surprised. The 2GHz Centrino in Butterfly seems to get me more useful performance, anyway -- especially now that it's been rejuvenated with 2Gb of RAM.) My 2007 desktop is also labeled 2GHz -- Core 2 Duo, this one; I could have gone a little faster, but not at a cost that seemed sensible.
One consequence of this stalling-out of speed gains is that it becomes more evident that older [Windoze] computers -- absent really drastic measures -- actually get slower as they age, and not just by comparison with their younger rivals. I think they get bogged down under the weight of patches and ever more elaborate self-defense software, until the Behemoth can barely get up to usable speed in twenty minutes most days. (And no, it's not a malware problem, except in the sense that if malware didn't exist there'd be a lot more cycles to use doing useful things.) I dread to think how one of those little netbooks fares after a year or two of XP updates.
I'm eying my next personal laptop purchase in the next month or so. It's nice to see that I can -- finally -- now get more memory and a slightly faster processor than the desktop in a 13-inch package. The question I'm asking myself is how far it's worth pushing that edge in the hope of getting something that will be able, five years down the line, to spare a few cycles from fighting the cyber-wars to let me check my f-list and poke at my novel, or whether the screamingly-fast version will cook itself to an early demise before we get that far. I'm pretty sure it doesn't make sense to put more than 4Gb of RAM in a laptop right now, for example -- but it might well make sense to go for one that can accommodate the 8Gb later on.
I'm determined to get a red one this time, though. Merlot or cherry, depending.
My first PC was a 25MHz 386 in 1992/3; the next was a 120MHz Pentium in 1997; after that came a 700Mz Pentium 3 desktop and 650MHz laptop in 2000, and then a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 laptop in 2004, though that was heavier than I'd have preferred. Back then, the steady increase in clock speed, as well as memory and disk space, seemed as inevitable as mass-market edition following hardcover.
Then things changed. In 2006 it was next to impossible to find a laptop at any size with a clock speed over 2GHz. (Considering how hot and bulky my poor old Behemoth is at 2.8, I wasn't too surprised. The 2GHz Centrino in Butterfly seems to get me more useful performance, anyway -- especially now that it's been rejuvenated with 2Gb of RAM.) My 2007 desktop is also labeled 2GHz -- Core 2 Duo, this one; I could have gone a little faster, but not at a cost that seemed sensible.
One consequence of this stalling-out of speed gains is that it becomes more evident that older [Windoze] computers -- absent really drastic measures -- actually get slower as they age, and not just by comparison with their younger rivals. I think they get bogged down under the weight of patches and ever more elaborate self-defense software, until the Behemoth can barely get up to usable speed in twenty minutes most days. (And no, it's not a malware problem, except in the sense that if malware didn't exist there'd be a lot more cycles to use doing useful things.) I dread to think how one of those little netbooks fares after a year or two of XP updates.
I'm eying my next personal laptop purchase in the next month or so. It's nice to see that I can -- finally -- now get more memory and a slightly faster processor than the desktop in a 13-inch package. The question I'm asking myself is how far it's worth pushing that edge in the hope of getting something that will be able, five years down the line, to spare a few cycles from fighting the cyber-wars to let me check my f-list and poke at my novel, or whether the screamingly-fast version will cook itself to an early demise before we get that far. I'm pretty sure it doesn't make sense to put more than 4Gb of RAM in a laptop right now, for example -- but it might well make sense to go for one that can accommodate the 8Gb later on.
I'm determined to get a red one this time, though. Merlot or cherry, depending.
