How Old Is Your Work Computer?

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/11/14/how-old-is-your-work-computer/

by bootload • 18 years ago

4 8 18 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

socratees• 18 years ago

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

gaius2• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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.

gaius2• 18 years ago

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.

blasdel• 18 years ago

Fuck, I can do pretty well with a Sparcstation 5! Especially running Linux 2.6 + X.org.

dillo would probably still be pretty snappy even on a 12mhz 386

manny• 18 years ago

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...

vegai• 18 years ago

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

gamble• 18 years ago

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?

How Old Is Your Work Computer?

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