How much life can a PC have?

[William R. Mosher]

I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

What ain't broke, don't fix. Make sure you bring the BIOS up to date.

Go with it. If you aren't happy with the result then you still have the option of buying a new box.
I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William

 

[Alan Simpson]

I think Vista is built around the whole notion of hardware being ever better, faster, cheaper. As every OS should be built. The old 4 GB limit of directly addressable memory in 32-bit machines will be replaced by the near infinite limits of 64-bit. (OK, so maybe 2^64 isn't "near infinity". But it's a big honkin' number). The point is, you have to design OSs to take advantage of what's coming, not what is or what used to be. And I think Vista does that. As 64-bit becomes more mainstream, so will Vista.



I don't know that there's any set rule on this. But I rarely keep the same machine as my "main machine" for more than 3 or 4 years. By then my main machine becomes my secondary machine. My secondary becomes my tertiary. And so forth down to the wife and kids' machines. (But don't tell them that).



When Vista is a real product I'll probably build a new main machine around it.





I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Vista scales much better than XP ever did. There is no need for super duper hardware. Nice to have, but not necessary.
I think Vista is built around the whole notion of hardware being ever better, faster, cheaper. As every OS should be built. The old 4 GB limit of directly addressable memory in 32-bit machines will be replaced by the near infinite limits of 64-bit. (OK, so maybe 2^64 isn't "near infinity". But it's a big honkin' number). The point is, you have to design OSs to take advantage of what's coming, not what is or what used to be. And I think Vista does that. As 64-bit becomes more mainstream, so will Vista.



I don't know that there's any set rule on this. But I rarely keep the same machine as my "main machine" for more than 3 or 4 years. By then my main machine becomes my secondary machine. My secondary becomes my tertiary. And so forth down to the wife and kids' machines. (But don't tell them that).



When Vista is a real product I'll probably build a new main machine around it.





I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William

 

[wgd]

of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now
and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

Well, I think you've answered your own question. All that really matters
is if you are satisfied with the performance of Vista on your computer.
Now that the Vista Beta 2 has been made widely available we see that the
dire predictions of the hardware requirements for Vista were nonsense. The
amount of memory is very important. I would not want to run Vista B2 on a
machine with less than 1 GB memory. And the Aero Glass UI requires a DX9
video card with at least 64 MB of memory and Shader Model 2.0 support. Not
a big deal at all. There are many older machines that with some modest
upgrades will have no problem at all running Vista.

 

[Michael]

Seems that PC hardware (Intel v AMD, Nvidia v ATI...) advances faster than
software (MS for OS, Office... and soon most anything else that runs on a
PC ); i.e. the software cannot take full advantage of multiple core,
HyperThreading, 64bit, 2+GB RAM etc.
For daily tasks - occasional word processing, email, web browsing,
shopping - most any PC produced in the last 2-3 years would be reasonably
fast if you tweak some of the eye-candy in XP or Vista.
If you advance to multimedia tasks - storage of pics, music, movies, you
simply need bigger and faster hard-drives.
Once you step up and begin playing latest games, editing video etc, you need
to upgrade at least the monitor and the graphics card - which implies a
newer motherboard and most anything else - PSU, CPU, RAM.
In a nutshell, if you keep doing whatever you are doing now and your CPU
does not run 100% all the time, you'll be about the same for the Vista
generation.
Michael

 

[Lang Murphy]

William,

If Beta 2 is running on your system in a manner that is satisfactory to you, then I would bet that the gold code will run even better.

If, on the other hand, right after installing the Vista gold code you suddenly become passionate about doing heavy duty graphics work on your box that you've never done before, then... well...

Lang


I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William

 

[William R. Mosher]

I don't see myself doing much beyond editing some photographs.

William
William,

If Beta 2 is running on your system in a manner that is satisfactory to you, then I would bet that the gold code will run even better.

If, on the other hand, right after installing the Vista gold code you suddenly become passionate about doing heavy duty graphics work on your box that you've never done before, then... well...

Lang


I bought my Gateway P4-2.0 GHZ computer in October 2002. At that time it had 256 MB of RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive and an Intel video card built into the motherboard with 64 MB of RAM and came with XP Home Edition. After all the upgrades over the years it now has a second hard drive of 80 GB, the RAM has been increased to 1.5 GB, and the video card is now an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128MB of RAM and it runs Windows Vista Beta 2 very nicely. I realize that the Windows Vista code has not been optimized for performance, so if it runs this when on my computer I wonder how well will the final release of Windows Vista run? It it runs the final release comparable to Windows XP in performance, I may not be needing a new computer until 2011-2012 given the cycle of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now and then.

What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of Windows Vista?

William