Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - Printable Version

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - Printable Version

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Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - NiteFox - 11-15-2005

I bet most of us have done it before. A tiny flaw manifests itself in a piece of hardware on your machine, and you use that as an excuse for a new upgrade. But, in all honesty, what was your weakest excuse used to fool your spouse/kids/parents/self into justifying that upgrade?

Some time during March this year, the old Foxbox was starting to grind on a bit. People have been in and out of prisons in the time my computer was 'alive'. It was eight years old.

It was also a spectaculary crappy Packard Bell PC, forged in the dark days of, um, darkness where all the PC manufacturers were trying to beat the iMac in design stakes with their smooth lines and superfluous edges and stuff. I'd overhauled the machine a lot in those eight years with a shiny PCI graphics card (64megs), 64MB of RAM on top of the 16 that came with the box (EDO is getting harder and harder to find now), a 20GB hard drive, several sets of keyboards and mice, and three monitors*.

Because much of the case design was "custom", it meant that when the CD drive started to crap out I had the perfect excuse - There was no way in hell I could buy a new drive to replace the custom-designed one for my computer, and you try finding a replacement drive to spec that doesn't cost more than a new PC. The problems were: Refusing to open on the first or fifth prod of the open/close button, problems reading, and generally junkedness.

So, in my zeal, I ordered the parts to build a new box. I had fun junking almost an entire system (Very little was salvagable, and I haven't bothered to put the old hard drive in my new box yet) all on the premise that the CD drive was acting a little fritzy, but I had to look at things logicall - If a serious problem arose, then I probably wouldn't have been able to install anything onto it from boot, since it was an old and custom BIOS that I couldn't flash. So I ordered the parts and waited.

The parts took a week to arrive, and the drive performed flawlessly in that time. :whistling: Ah well, better I junk the old girl then than later.

* Best excuse I've ever had for upgrading a component was when my second monitor blew up. The tube inside literally exploded resulting in a bright flash that burned onto my retinas and a lot of smoke. It was awesome. The fact that I was drunk at the time had nothing to do with it. :ph34r:

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - --Pete - 11-16-2005

Hi,

Good reason? Bad reason? I don't know. But every upgrade in my systems since my first XT twenty plus years ago has been because my existing machine ("machines" after Magi discovered games :) ) would not run the latest games, or at least not well.

However, there was the XT system, a 386 system, a couple of P166's, the 600MHz Pentium systems for D2, and the hot-rods I'd be working on now if they'd ever let me out of this joint. Five generations in about twenty years is not bad, IMHO, when talking of computers. Given technological advancement, I could have easily doubled that. But five has been enough to keep up with the games.

--Pete

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - Doc - 11-16-2005

Hrm... Back when I had a bad case of techno-fever, and this is really really embarassing, I dropped several thousand dollars on a new Mac. A spiffy top of the new newfangled Mac called the Quadra 900. It was... Utterly amazing. And huge. It was like having the monolith from 2001 on your desk. And it ran at a scary fast 25mhz on an 040 moto chip. And a few months later, Apple scrapped the 900 and introduced the Quadra 950 in it's stead. And the 950... Good Lord have mercy... The 950 ran at 33mhz. And it had some serious video horsepower. Enough to drive a 20 inch monitor. Dedicated video mind you... It could do utterly amazing things like render a full colour 2 meg tiff image in under 5 minutes. And then one of the Mac rags, Mac User I think, which is now gone, reported that NASA bought a cartload of these things for advanced computing. There was such a commotion. The 950 was hardcore hardware. Bleeding edge. And the 900? The previous king of the hill, now a month or three or four old? Junk. Compared to new specs, it was junk. It was like getting stuck with a Performa or an LC. And like the Mac II before it, and other high end Macs, you could hook up six monitors to it for the ultimate in technonerd status. And it was 33mhz compared to 25mhz on the previous model. I mean, that's 8 whole megahertz... How could any sane reasonable person say no to that?

What can I say... I had to buy it. Just like I had to buy the wicked fast IIfx. And a short time later, I just had to buy the Powermac 9500. It was around then that my technolust cooled. I realised it was stupid buying bleeding edge at that point because my computer spent most of it's time waiting on me.

Edit.

Ouch.

damn!

Good grief, what was I thinking?

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - jahcs - 11-16-2005

My God man! Those are supercomputers! 4 megs of RAM! :D

Back when programmers knew how to write code that meant something. Now it takes 512 MB just for windows to say 'hello.'

Not to turn this into a "My computer is more archaic than yours" thread but this reminds me of the first computer my family owned:

Yes friends, that is a green-screen.

The powerhouse known as he Apple III

We bought it used in 1986 from the original owner (my grade school Principal's son) and used it until 1993 when I graduated high school. :blush:

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - Drasca - 11-16-2005

Doc,Nov 15 2005, 07:36 PM Wrote:It was like getting stuck with a Performa or an LC.[right][snapback]94981[/snapback][/right]

Wow! A quadra owner! And a 9500 owner!. Sniff :( I owned a performa 400, it was the equivalent of a LCII at the time. 40 mhz (I think), and 80 megabytes of hard drive space and 4 megs of ram. That was huge! Then... a Performa 6400. It had... gasp... a bass audio speaker built-in! I was shocked. It was uber cool. Microphone, 200mhz, and a few gigs... gigs! of hard drive space. It was my baby. . . Until my Sony Vaoi laptop for Diablo II... Pitiful excuse to upgrade? Yep. Very very bad. If Diablo II for mac came out sooner, I might not have upgraded. Then finally some real power: A brand spanking new graphite tower Apple G4. Reason? Unknown. It was a major upgrade at the time. Good enough reason here.

Now... I'm playing on a 4x AGP bus with a 8x AGP card, sitting on ram to spare, and pack plenty of CPU and no great huge hard drive concerns. No big need to upgrade. It works, most of the time.

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - yangman - 11-16-2005

As far as computer upgrades go, I don't really have a weak execuse. All the upgrades I've had -- all 7 of them -- were more or less caused by a desperate need for more computing power.

My mountain bike, however, has had some serious cash spent on it over the last few months, some probably frivolously. The latest was a pair of tires, bought from a used sporting goods store, for $50 each. (They also deal in buying out old stocks, so the tires are brand new.)

The justifaction? I've had the old ones since the bike was bought, and they were wearing out. Sounds totally sound and valid except when the fact that I've only installed one of the new tires, and am still running the old tire in the front. And I plan to put the old rear-tire on the front once it's actually worn out. :whistling:

Oh well. It's always good to have spares around. :P

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - Fragbait - 11-16-2005

Hi,

Don't know which is weaker:

'I NEED a laptop when I get started with my study.' (20th Oct. 2003)

or

'I need the new PC that is capable of running Diablo II fluidly NOW.' (20th Dec. 1999; when D II was actually released in June 2000)

Ok. I guess they're both quite weak, and I am ashamed. :unsure:

Overall I (we) have had:

a] a 486 with 25 MHz (50 with turbo ! :D )
b] a P I with 90 MHz
c] a P III with 500 MHz (runs at 600 for 3 years now)
d] a P IV laptop with 2.66 GHz (not a good choice for a laptop chip)

Greetings, Fragbait

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - whyBish - 11-17-2005

Fragbait,Nov 16 2005, 11:58 PM Wrote:[right][snapback]95027[/snapback][/right]

Yeah, I've done the same. I got a new PC after about two weeks of D2.

My current machine the excuses were:
- I need a new one for "Oblivion" (still not out)
- I need a new one so that I can run XP, so that I can run .NET, so that I can create web services, so that I can create an online game, so that I can make more money and upskill
- I need a new one because I deleted some core windows files from the old one and couldn't find my 98 CD :P

Weakest Excuse for an Upgrade - Doc - 11-17-2005

The 9500 is still a working computer. It's a file server and email server at the moment. It works under an incredible strain and workload. For it's age, it's utterly amazing that the old beast can still do what it does. It never fails. It crashes maybe once in a blue moon. It has some upgrades, I think it has 256 megs of ram now. It just goes and goes and goes like Macintoshes tend to do. The cooling system in that beast whines like a jet engine now, I think the fans are going to go. (The 604e produced to much heat) I got OSX server to run on it, even though OSX server claims it needs a G3. Buying a dual CPU 9500 paid off, as I figured it one day would. Both of those CPUs manage to handle OSX server just fine. Before it was sent off to be a beast of burdon, I used to play many games of Diablo on that machine. And Sim Tower. And Sim City 2000. I suddenly miss that machine.

Also still hard at work in various places. An aging Mac Plus. Still working. Has yet to ever fail. It's twin, the other Mac Plus, sadly bit the bullet and committed suicide. All circuits fried. A chugging Centris 610. Still going strong. 24 megs of ram! Still performs flawlessly. Dependable, except when the office gets to hot, and then that old gal gets flakey. She must be kept cold. The Quadra 700 and the 900 are still working. The Power Mac 6100/66 is still being used as an office MP3 server. She doesn't like to be rebooted and has some troubles restarting, but once she is up and running, she goes. Several IIsi models, many IIci models, and assorted 030 machines are still hard at work and doing their job, even after all these years. There is an aging 7100 that we use as a network print server. I don't know how much longer she is going to hold out. She really does need an upgrade. Every 7100 I have encountered has always been flakey. Several 6400 and 6500 models still hard at work as internet machines that people go on line with, find jobs, and browse classifieds every single day. A 7500 acts as a router and server for the 6X00s.

I could make all kinds of excuses to upgrade these machines, but why bother? They work so well. There is no need to buy newer hardware yet. They still do the job.