PC101-Personal
Computer 101
Do I need to
buy the newest, faster computers
when they come out?
Basically, it depends on why you are
upgrading. Computers and electronics in general change at an
awesome rate and financially you could dig yourself into a major hole
trying to keep up with the latest models and features.
If you would be upgrading just to get a faster CPU then you may
be disappointed, as there are other limiting factors to increased speed
on a PC:
- How fast is your
Communication Bus
and other devices that "talk" with the CPU (disks, CD, memory, etc.)?
- If you are going for faster
dialup
internet speed you will probably not see much difference as you will be
limited by the transfer rate of your phone line. Exception is
DSL/cable.
- Will your applications actually be able to take
advantage of the CPU potential? If they are older programs
you may not see much improvement, and in fact may not work on a newer
OS.
The point being here is that upgrading just to move up
to the next CPU speed is not by itself a good reason, (unless
you are running an old computer that is 300 Mhz or so) as other
bottlenecks may prevent you from even seeing much difference. Yet
overall, a faster CPU and
larger memory will allow you to multitask to
a greater degree and at greater speed.
Reasons you
might want to upgrade are:
Eventually support for older versions of the OS goes away and
if you do not or cannot upgrade your OS you may find that you cannot
use new applications that come out or even access some websites.
You will find that your HW
eventually cannot handle the new games and applications that come out
as they tend to demand greater and greater resources and performance
from the HW.
You find you are putting too much time and money into your old
machine. Prices have come down tremendously over the years
and it is highly debatable these days whether it is worth putting much
money into an older computer to improve it when the newer ones now cost
so little.
Maybe you want to try something different, like go to a Mac or use the
Linux OS on your new PC.
Finally, you might want to lose that
old clunker of a boat anchor for a
new slim-down laptop 
that has a small foot-print
and you can
take with you when you travel.
Got questions
you would like answered? Yes
keoni@isp.com