On 7/19/2018 11:14 PM, OFWW wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:54:08 -0400, J. Clarke
wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 22:47:55 -0400, Bill wrote:

I accidentally deleted the post, but someone (Jack?) wrote that
he was tired of hardware systems lasting only 3 years.

It seems that systems sold at retail (Best Buy?) are built that
way, so that you come back to replace them. If you assemble your
own, using quality components, you can expect it to have a
lifetime alot longer than 3 years..long enough the you'll
probably be ready to replace the system for other reasons before
it stops. The purchase price will be a bit higher. But you will
also be in a much better position to service it if you want to
upgrade it. I just wanted to mention that this alternative option
is available. I think that once you do it, you'll never again
settle for someone else's choices (in a system).

FWIW, my 200 Mhz Pentium Thinkpad still works fine. It's not really
useful today but it boots and runs. One doesn't have to build a
machine to get quality, one does though have to get a machine that
isn't intended to be a loss-leader.

And it takes a long time for a system to become obsolete due to
inadequate performance today. At work we replaced our 3 year old
laptops with new ones with higher spec and there is no noticeable
difference in performance. Performance improvements have been coming
slowly for a long time--having more gates at the same clockspeed
builds paper performance but you don't see it in the real world unless
you have a process that can be parallelized.

You can really tell the difference when processing, converting, etc.
Graphics, or responses from a db and on large spreadsheets, but most
notable with graphics.



AND way back when, when processing twice as fast meant something
meaningful, 5 seconds to process vs 10 seconds, that was a very
noticeable improvement.

Today cutting a half second processing time to one quarter second is not
noticeable.

I remember boot time taking up to 7 minutes on one of my od computers.
Blame HP printer software for half of that time. Today my 7 year old
custom built computer boots off if a SSD and takes 15-30 seconds.