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When was the last time you upgraded your hardware?
| 7% | 18 votes |
| 4% | 10 votes |
| 8% | 19 votes |
| 18% | 43 votes |
| 13% | 31 votes |
| 21% | 51 votes |
| 16% | 38 votes |
| 11% | 26 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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When was the last time you upgraded your hardware?
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by lgsoynews on Tuesday June 10 2014, @07:09PM
It would be interesting to know how old was your hardware when you upgraded it...
I answered 6 months, but my computer was over 10 years old then (it was a complete replacement). Quite different from a graphics card change or whatsnot.
BTW, I was a bit disappointed by the performance gain: it was good, but not really extraordinary. And that's with a previous computer that was only mid-range (10 years ago), while the new one is top of the line (I spoiled myself).
(Score: 2) by Woods on Tuesday June 10 2014, @08:58PM
I just upgraded my setup so I could play Watchdogs, the gear I had previously was not very old, maybe 5 years, but the video card did (apparently) not support DirectX 11, so it would not even load the game at all. A lot of other things in that system were broken, RAM slots gone bad, audio going on the fritz, and all that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11 2014, @12:48AM
If you didn't get a SSD, that will make a huge improvement. Otherwise that the main limiting factor these days is network capacity, and you can't do much for that.
(Score: 1) by lgsoynews on Wednesday June 11 2014, @01:44PM
Yep, I did go full SSD.
Not really for the performance gain, but first for the complete silence (I'm really keen on silent computers since my desktop is only 3 meters from my bed...). My previous HDDs were silent, but you could still hear them, not so with SSDs of course.
SSDs and a large amount of ram (16Gb) are a huge improvement over my previous setup. Especially for the virtual machines since I make an extensive use of VMs for my Linux distros tests & some dev (to keep different environments/versions from my principal Linux setup).
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday June 11 2014, @11:37PM
It's the CPU fan that's noisy in my old tower, but it's missing a screw so of course it's noisy. But it's in the living room.
And I spent 4 years in the USAF. If a C5-A or a B-52 (not to mention an SR-71) doesn't wake you up, nothing will. I sleep through thunderstorms when the tornado sirens are going off.
I'll probably get a Darwin Award for my deep sleeping...
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Wednesday June 11 2014, @10:09AM
I gave my old dual core system to my kids and got myself an 8 core new system.
Performance was essentially the same for almost all applications. The one thing I saw was a performance gain in transcoding video. While I don't do much of that, I bought the system to get it done in a reasonable time.
Between some archaic videos from work that I needed to add to a new presentation and the kids videos and the occasional bluray rip, it was worth the $$$. But your mileage will vary.
(Score: 1) by lgsoynews on Wednesday June 11 2014, @01:55PM
Well, there is ONE program where the performance gains were HUGE and obvious: the POV-Ray raytracing tool.
I sometimes use it to generate simple images using a few basic geometric shapes, and a few nice textures. For instance, I created some dice (RPG style), animated them (using the tool animation) then generated animated GIFs that were not too bad. I misplaced them somewhere on an old disk, but it's something I couldn't do by hand.
Since a recent version, POV-Ray has allowed the use of threads, well, provided you compiled the sources because it was still experimental. So I did and tested the performances. The gain was impressive: my processor has 8 cores, and the generation time was divided by 8. THAT was nice, because ray-tracing is so sloooowwww. I remember when I did some with a 486, back in the days, it was painful. Even with very small -and simple scenes-.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy on Wednesday June 11 2014, @01:33PM
About a week ago I upgraded my gaming system after five years on the same hardware (Phenom X3) and managed to replace substantially all of my wife's desktop (~10 year old Sempron) with the leftovers. The parts from my wife's system went into a spare case I had lying around and are now destined to find life as a NAS. Now if I can just find a home for the four other desktops I keep in the garage....
Back in the day I found it was pretty much mandatory to upgrade every two or three years if I wanted to play anything recent but since most PC games these days get released on consoles as well it seems like most developers aren't trying to push systems as hard. On the one hand it's nice that staying up to date isn't such a rat race anymore but on the other I really miss dicking around with settings and hardware; one of my fondest memories is messing around with EMM386 settings to be able to play Wing Commander: Privateer.
Anyway, I think hardware has reached the point where spinning drives are the bottleneck on otherwise high end systems. My brother has a comparable system to mine but with the OS and some games on an SSD and it leaves me wishing I'd splurged on one too.
1087 is a lucky prime.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by meisterister on Wednesday June 11 2014, @05:41PM
My hardware was an IBM thinkcentre from 2005. I'm sorry that you didn't see a huge performance gain, but going from a Pentium 4 HT with integrated graphics and 1 GB of RAM to an FX 8350 with a dedicated card and 16 GB of RAM was a huge leap forward for me. I suppose it depends on what you were doing with that computer, as well as how much RAM it had.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Buck Feta on Wednesday June 11 2014, @05:44PM
> I answered 6 months, but my computer was over 10 years old then
Same here, but I was rather happier with the performance gains. It's lovely to boot in 3 seconds rather than 3 minutes, and wonderful to run multiple applications across three huge monitors without everything bogging to a crawl.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 1) by PReDiToR on Wednesday June 11 2014, @05:54PM
Well, testing complete on the newer chassis, I went and grabbed the mS200 and WD Black to fit into my laptop. This makes me a very happy geek.
1TB, 750GB, 120GB, 120GB = very nearly 2TB in a laptop.
So brand new hardware, upgraded immediately. And spoiling ourselves is our reward for being smart. And enjoying nice toys.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Wednesday June 11 2014, @11:32PM
Yes, it would, but I found this poll itself interesting. I used to upgrade more frequently than I could really afford to, but I was gaming then and you needed new shit to play any games.
Now? I have a five year old notebook, two ten year old towers and a few old computers that never get plugged in.
I was going to build a new tower and make into a media center, or rather, better than what I have now, one of the towers is the "media center".
The simple fact is that these days, upgrades are seldom really needed. Fifteen years ago hardware badly ran its software (and programmers started using really inefficient tools) but today hardware is so fast that even with sloppy, bloated programming today, (remember, I used to program in less than 20k RAM) the hardware runs it easily.
I need more storage so I do plan on building a new tower. Unfortunately the engine in my car expensively quit so I had to buy a different one, and my oral surgery and false teeth are going to cost me three grand so the computer upgrade (and new mattress) will have to wait.
Hey, somebody buy a book, I need the money!
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 12 2014, @05:27PM
It would be more interesting to know just what people consider to be "hardware".
My phone (just upgraded) has much more processing power than this old Celeron OpenBSD system on which I am posting. But posting on the phone is a PITA, and I consider it an upgrade to this old laptop just by nuking XP and installing BSD.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lhsi on Tuesday June 10 2014, @07:10PM
I got a new phone at the start of the year. Before that I got a tablet a couple of years ago. I do almost all my home computing between those two. I have a netbook I use occasionally and haven't plugged in my old PC since moving house 2 years ago.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Wednesday June 11 2014, @03:29AM
So I assume by work you mean angry birds, netflix, and 'emails wthot spelll correct or punctation' on a touch screen?
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Wednesday June 11 2014, @07:24AM
I don't work at home. Considering I didn't say that I do in my original post, I'm not sure why you think I would be working.
(Also, my touch screen keyboard does have a spell checker)
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday June 11 2014, @11:43PM
Subsentient must have an old flip phone or he'd know that any modern smart phone does indeed have (often annoying) spell check.
Me, I'm retired. I write books on the five year old notebook I'm typing on now. Go read them, they're free unless you want it on that quaint old paper format. Well, they're even free at the library.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jasassin on Tuesday June 10 2014, @08:54PM
I bought an at I radeon HD3450 years ago to replace Intel HD on an E2180 CPU. It plays all the humble bundle games. I have no reason to upgrade. Works great in windows 7, but needs back ports even for an old OS like wheezy :(
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(Score: 1) by jummama on Friday June 13 2014, @02:33PM
Try a newer Debian like jessie. The open source drivers have been getting a lot better, and should support that 3450.
(Score: 1) by Darth Turbogeek on Tuesday June 10 2014, @09:09PM
The reason of course was that a upgrade was just not compelling. Oh sure I stored some more shit on external drives but my base hardware pretty much stayed as it was. Even with the new systems I play with all the time, the old home stuff was more than good enough.
Until my laptop died and I sourced my new laptop. I know SSD systems can fly but this thing is in a different league! It's a fucking beast of a machine, it's not light nor small but it's startlingly fast. Because hardware has been good enough for a while, I havent really taken much interest in what hardware was doing so to see a laptop with dedicated 4Gb DDR3 RAM video just fucked with my brain. It also fucks with my brain that Windows 8.1 on it is just ridiculously responsive - everything just opens and works so effortlessly fast.
So I guess it's taken a few years but hardware upgrades got compelling again.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by ramloss on Wednesday June 11 2014, @12:28AM
Two years ago my son needed a laptop an I decided to give him my four-year old white macbook. After evaluating my usage I realized that basically I carried my laptop between home and work while rarely using it on the go.
So I decided to get the most powerful desktop I could afford to replace my aging Athlon X2 at home, since my workplace computer had just recently been upgraded to a decent rig. I buit an i7-2600K based desktop with Radeon HD 6850 graphics (not cutting edge even at that time) and it has breezed through every task I have put it through. Granted, I don't game much anymore and the most demanding application I have is a GIS software, but I have yet to find a need for more powerful hardware, my only regret is not going for the (then) top of the line ivy bridge i7 processor.
Regardless, barring hardware failure I don't see me upgrading in at least another three years. It's quite a departure from my former approach when I painstakingly compared price-performance on every part and then incrementally upgraded as-needed, this time I took as much money as I could afford (a little bit more actually) and bought the more powerful parts regardless of price (within reason) I think this new strategy paid off, as I got the most powerful machine I ever owned compared to the contemporaneous average.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11 2014, @07:53AM
That's racist!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11 2014, @01:09PM
No, you're thinking of the white powerbook.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday June 11 2014, @11:47PM
Damn, and I used all my mod points. I laughed at that!
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(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday June 12 2014, @10:06PM
I earned my 'whooosh' badge just now. It just hit me after two hours.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Funny) by WizardFusion on Wednesday June 11 2014, @10:42AM
Insensitive clod, all my stuff is in the cloud.!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 11 2014, @02:48PM
I've just replaced at various times the motherboard, CPU, hard drives, optical drives, RAM, case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, networking, sound, video card, power supply, etc.
Which lends itself to the interesting philosophical question about at what point does this thing become a new computer.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ryuugami on Wednesday June 11 2014, @08:13PM
A well-known philosophical conundrum, called the Ship of Theseus [wikipedia.org].
In the case of a PC, I would say that changing the motherboard makes it a new computer, as the motherboard is the one that binds all of the other parts together.
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday June 11 2014, @11:51PM
At one point I had what may have been the world's most powerful IBM XT computer. I had replaced everything except the case, power supply, and keyboard (I think it was a 386 when I got done with it, it was a long time ago).
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11 2014, @05:27PM
I've been building new computers roughly every 3-4 years. $12-1500 on a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, power supply and system disk usually has me running any high end games I feel like through that three year cycle, and the cost isn't that high when factored in over the time.
There's definitely a ton of room for improvement with that price point, but a computer costing more than that will be just as obsoleted by my next build in three years anyways.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khedoros on Thursday June 12 2014, @01:05AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cmn32480 on Thursday June 12 2014, @02:08AM
My new I7 laptop will be in for work.
My personal gear hasn't been touched in better than 5 years. And as much as I would like to play games, the time and $$ just isn't there to be able to play the newest stuff that tickles my fancy.
I miss the days of gaming... but my desktop rig rarely ever gets turned on anymore. Kinda like a relic of a bygone era.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 12 2014, @05:54AM
First, it was the IMSAI 8080. Then the Commodore64. Then a AST Premium 286 - DOS3.30 which later got motherboard and OS replacement to 486 - DOS6.20 . The motherboard was not an exact fit and required sawing and filing the case to make it fit. Later I found a Pentium-166 in a scrap heap ( WIN95).. apparently the last of the ISA stuff. I kept that for the longest time. I am having a helluva time trying ( still unsuccessful ) to wean myself from DOS. When it comes to some quickie math algorithm or interface I want to check out, here comes my old Mathcad, Borland Eureka, and Borland C++, or (God Forbid!)... GWBasic!. I still do my tax forms in Bricklin's VisiCalc.
Basically, everything I do that I think I may want to access ten years from now, I still use the DOS tools. I have had them for 30 years, and suspect, like a fine hammer, they will last me the rest of my life. I have seen way too much of later stuff come into and go out of fashion, and not much chance of retaining access to the things I spent so much time on.
I stayed with WIN95 until about two years ago I started getting into Arduinos big time, and I had to be compatible with later EAGLE and development tools, so I bought a WIN7 HP CQ56 for $300 from WalMart and have been using it since. With the Arduinos, I am back in my home territory .. hardware interfacing, bit-banging, and other low-level stuff that I learned when memory and hardware was very expensive and CPU resources were very limited.
As far OS went, it was first an assembler/monitor for the IMSAI, then onto C64 where its assembler, EasyScript( word processor ), and its built-in basic interpreter covered about 99% of what I used it for. Then it was DOS3.3, DOS 6.20, WIN95, then WIN7. I never knew or worked with the interim systems.
The big "shear" was at WIN7 albeit I found the DOS7.0 under WIN95 unusable and always reverted to 6.20. As far as I am concerned, my DOS stuff is stuff that does what I tell it to do, and my WIN7 machine is an appliance, an app-runner. I see DOS as my kitchen, I see WIN7 as a restaurant, and its well understood I do not tell the chef how to do his work. I accept my options are not limited to my imagination, rather the limits are what is on the menu. This is the first machine I have had I do not know how to fix should it break. The other machines routinely got taken apart and reassembled in various ways. Incidentally, that dam' AST was as bad as a Compaq when it came to replacement hardware. It looked like a "standard box". Inside, it was not. By this time, I had learned my lesson about buying anything with proprietary hardware parts. The -486 motherboard I got for it was as generic as they come.
Side note: Just for fun, I took a course in data structures from a local community college. I wanted some more tricks and exposure to C++ albeit I already had Borland TurboC++ 3.0 - picked up at a swap meet for $5. The college had several old machines in the dumper. I asked the professor if he would take my work in DOS instead of Windows, explaining the reason I was taking the course was to learn a few more tricks for embedded processors ( I did a lot of work in 68HC000's at the time, designing their hardware, then programming them mostly in assembler ). He agreed, as long as I did the work in C++ and submitted the source code and did not take up class time with unique implementation problems concerning aging hardware. Well, that was one area I am really good in so I went for it. It was kinda fun in a way seeing others spending a helluva lot of money trying to do the same thing I was doing with what I got out of the dumper, and mine worked. My professor gave my a unique compliment by asking me if I would sign a release form for him so he could use copies of my homework assignments as examples of how work should be coded.;)
Those were the days... Today everything seems to be in such a heated rush, in the pressure cooker, trying to make silk purses out of pig ears, faster than anyone else says they can do it. Few can have the pleasure of actually being creative anymore. The stuff we have to do today seems far more likely to cause ulcers.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Friday June 13 2014, @03:15AM
I'm running a four or five year old Dell Desktop at home. The only "upgrade" has been a new hardrive when the old one started making bad noises. Plus with two terabytes I know that I'll never, ever fill it up. The only planned upgrade is more RAM so that VirtualBox can run a little more comfortably.
However, I am on my fifth smartphone (A BlackBerry Z10 this time) and many days that's my primary computing platform. Aside from creating and editing large documents it does pretty everything that I need on a day to day basis.
And I gave my laptop to one of the kids when I realized that my smartphone made it pretty much irrelevant.