New computer or upgrade?

[BigT]

I have recently been looking at the advances in computing and wondering if I need to think about getting a new computer. Normally, or at least over the last 10 years or so, I have been changing my computer about twice a year, not always to get a clear upgrade, sometimes just to try a different set-up to see how well it works. This has proven useful in the past because of the number of people who come to me to ask if I will fix their computer or to ask for help and advice on builds or bought computers. However, for the last year I have been working on the same laptop! OK, it is an AMD Athlon X2 with 2gb DDRII memory 16ogb hard drive, and one thing I find useful, the screen revolves through 180 degrees and lays flat, turning it into a Tablet PC. On top of that, the 12.1" screen means it is small enough that I can take it to meetings and it is not excessively larger that an A4 notebook, and I can write directly to the screen and save the work as written, or convert it into a typed WOrd document. The only downside is it runs Windows Vista, which seems a rather bloated OS and slows everything down in comparison to XP, but HP will not publish drivers for XP and I have not been able to accumulate all teh drivers to give me the same functionallity. So what to do?

I have given this some thought and to tell the truth, I know that the laptop is plenty powerful enough, and does everything I need it to do quickly, and as long as I keep it cleaned out, there is little cause to get a new one. Have I grown out of the upgrade game? Well no, not really. The problem is that the CPU (Central Processing Unit), the Brain that drives the computer, has not in itself, grown significantly more powerful. In fact, I have been fixing a couple of computers recently, mostly single cored Athlons and Pentium 4's, and surprisingly, they are every bit as fast as the dual and triple cores I have been fixing. So I thought I would look into this a bit more and it seems that the main benefit of dual or more cores is that you can do more that one main task without losing speed, as the separate cores can handle a task each. This is great if you want to do some video rendering, or some other CPU intensive task, and then carry on surfing, composing letters etc, but for the avarage person, it is unlikely you will be putting a dual core to anything like a test.

Which brings me back to should I upgrade? I have a dual core, I do occasionally muli-task, and a simple memory upgrade is usually enough to give a significant boost to the computer. Then of course, Windows 7 is expected to start coming out in October so that would seem like a better time to actually upgrade. Particularly as W7 is vastly better than Vista (Yes I have tried it, I have W7 beta on a spare hard drive which I pop into my laptop when I have enough time to play with the new OS). No, all in all, I would advise anybody thinking about it, get your computer checked out, do a little maintenance and pop in a little extra memory (remembering the 32 bit editions of XP can only read up to about 3 gb) and wait until W7 is ready for general release. Spending money on a new computer just now does not seem like a wise thing to do.

If anybody is considering an upgrade or changing their computer for a slightly better model, you can easily post in this section and there are a bound to be a couple of others like myself who will be glad to help with ideas and advice where appropriate. If I can't help, I have contacts all over the place whom I can often ask! That is the beauty of forums like this, so don't be shy, just ask and we will try to help.

Till later then!

[Oliver]

Interesting thinking Tony.

I have read that the advantage of dual processors is more in the theory than the delivery. Apparently very little software has been written (I'm talking only Windows based machines here) for dual core processors. The result is that there is little discernible advantage in practice.

This might explain your findings FWIW

Oliver

[BigT]

Hi Oliver,
You are absolutely right. In general many older single core chips can pretty much hold their own compared to duel core for ordinary tasks. This will change though as more programs are designed to use the advantages that dual core offers, but it is taking time. Of course, waiting at this stage is a good idea as the general cost of dual core is falling as quad core chips become more common, and the advantages become more pronounced from a grater number of programs and games that can take advantage of the muti-core environment.
Just as an aside, the reason that Intel and AMD have gone into the multi-core arena is because technology at present meant that they had more or less reached the maximum speed that silicon based chips could handle due to heat and size problems (I won't go into too much detail here, but if anybody has any questions, please let me know) so they found that putting two cores together allowed for up to 20% increase in power in ideal conditions and more for programs written to use dual core. Now of coures, we have Intel looking at 16 core and I seem to remember reading that they are trying out a 32 core chip, though it will be quite a while in the future before these come out.

BigT