billski
Active member
Like my cars and skis, I keep my things long beyond their "usable life." It's time to finally replace my 10-year old PC. In the past, I've always bought one technologies below the top, after which the top PC's go non-linear in terms of price. Over the years I do some upgrades, particularly disk, and memory and a PCI card or two. I am generally a business user (docs, browsers, excel, powerpoint) but I also use the PC to manage backups on my home network as well as network configurations.
I would like your perspective on how best to buy (or shall we say, invest). Particularly:
1. I thought about 64 bit Vista, but there are still compatibility problems, especially with a key app I paid big bucks for and one or two device drivers for ancient peripherals I still use and probably for a few more years (parallel printers, SCISdrives, ATAPI CD burners that work with specific apps, a source of huge aggravation) since I'm not about to lay out more cash for "perfectly good" peripherals. Is it practical to upgrade to 64 bit later?
1a. I love memory, my apps love memory, but with 3GB max on 32-bit, what should I do? Buy more memory now with the new PC, even though I can't use it?
2. Now here's the BIG question. Cores. 2 or 4? Standard wisdom suggests 2 is enough. But then again, when I bought my PC 10 years ago, nobody ever imagined watching streaming video, or storing GBs of photos and music. iPod was a wet dream then. So I'm thinking about getting 4 cores. 10 years ago, nobody used anything but a lightweight anti-virus. Now we've got so much background processing going with firewalls, etc. just to protect the machine, Lord knows what will layer on next. I also love L2 cache, so the biggest honking cache I can afford is the object. How does L2 cache relate to number of cores, from a performance perspective. Leaning toward 4 cores. What should I do?
3. Expansion - I always get extra bays and slots, I inevitably use them. This will be my 4th PC. That's a statement, not a question.
4. I'm leaning towards external disk storage for backups. I backup 4 machines right now, soon to be 5. I've lived through tape backups and today use DVDs for backup, but it's a manual process which is now taking too long and I'd like to avoid. Just backups, not data transport. Any suggestions?
5. Does video need to be future-proofed? I watch the occassional TV show, but I'm not really big on TV anyways. That said, I could see getting a helmet cam and editing skiing some day.
6. RAID - thought about doing raid 0 , primarily to increase performance, but that doubles the odds of disk failures (I've had my share). A higher level of raid is not justified by the cost - I figured I'd get faster processors with more L2 cache instead.
There are a lot more technology choices than when selecting 10 years ago.
Being in the business, I understand that specific applications are either disk or memory intensive. Since I'm not in a position to seek voodoo lady advice about the future, I figure I would beef up both.
I often have 40-50 windows open concurrently, fairly big file sizes.
Any other suggestions for future-proofing the machine?
Thanks techno-dweebs of the world!
I would like your perspective on how best to buy (or shall we say, invest). Particularly:
1. I thought about 64 bit Vista, but there are still compatibility problems, especially with a key app I paid big bucks for and one or two device drivers for ancient peripherals I still use and probably for a few more years (parallel printers, SCISdrives, ATAPI CD burners that work with specific apps, a source of huge aggravation) since I'm not about to lay out more cash for "perfectly good" peripherals. Is it practical to upgrade to 64 bit later?
1a. I love memory, my apps love memory, but with 3GB max on 32-bit, what should I do? Buy more memory now with the new PC, even though I can't use it?
2. Now here's the BIG question. Cores. 2 or 4? Standard wisdom suggests 2 is enough. But then again, when I bought my PC 10 years ago, nobody ever imagined watching streaming video, or storing GBs of photos and music. iPod was a wet dream then. So I'm thinking about getting 4 cores. 10 years ago, nobody used anything but a lightweight anti-virus. Now we've got so much background processing going with firewalls, etc. just to protect the machine, Lord knows what will layer on next. I also love L2 cache, so the biggest honking cache I can afford is the object. How does L2 cache relate to number of cores, from a performance perspective. Leaning toward 4 cores. What should I do?
3. Expansion - I always get extra bays and slots, I inevitably use them. This will be my 4th PC. That's a statement, not a question.
4. I'm leaning towards external disk storage for backups. I backup 4 machines right now, soon to be 5. I've lived through tape backups and today use DVDs for backup, but it's a manual process which is now taking too long and I'd like to avoid. Just backups, not data transport. Any suggestions?
5. Does video need to be future-proofed? I watch the occassional TV show, but I'm not really big on TV anyways. That said, I could see getting a helmet cam and editing skiing some day.
6. RAID - thought about doing raid 0 , primarily to increase performance, but that doubles the odds of disk failures (I've had my share). A higher level of raid is not justified by the cost - I figured I'd get faster processors with more L2 cache instead.
There are a lot more technology choices than when selecting 10 years ago.
Being in the business, I understand that specific applications are either disk or memory intensive. Since I'm not in a position to seek voodoo lady advice about the future, I figure I would beef up both.
I often have 40-50 windows open concurrently, fairly big file sizes.
Any other suggestions for future-proofing the machine?
Thanks techno-dweebs of the world!
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