New Computer

[2manyrocks]

If he is editing 4k video, he probably doesn't have time for any gaming.

 

[Oaktree]

I think the desktop is now a dead end technology. It was always only a small percentage of people that used these, for private creative reasons, at home. The true use of computers for most people, is now mobile information access. The Smart Phone provides this.

Dealing with smartphones makes me appreciate what my parents' generation went thru trying to figure out how to program a VCR.
I can generally figure out the basics eventually, but overall I find them not very intuitive in operation. A piece of technology I've decided to skip for the foreseeable future.
I greatly prefer a desktop PC. Large monitor (actually dual on mine), large keyboard, mouse a lot easier to use than touchscreens and a much more versatile OS.

 

[JasperFrank]

I will say that Smart Phones are NOT intuitive to use. And I like your use of the word "Intuitive." I have struggled with Smart Phones also. And I have been involved with computers for over 40 years. The menu systems make no sense to me as to how to navigate them to the place you want to go. Had a strange, and some what complicated occurrence with an old girl friend visiting my area. She was tethered to a phone for direction and recommendations. I was attempting to show her the unique things, that a google search could not find, that were off the track; and she had great difficultly following to these special places with out the phone to say turn here and there, which were all wrong. She is still a good friend, but It was difficult in the way she was using her phone to always say, "This Place," which I'd been to, and it was not the best. The Phone was directing her and telling her, at the same time, "This is where you go and this is the best," over what I was saying as more interesting.

The Phone Won. I still find this interesting, that an old friend, in my case, was ursuped by a cell phone.

 

[Jaygyver]

This is just a hobby, not commercial or use heavy duty software.
For ME, I don’t like “All in One” non upgradeable computers like the iMac, as nice as they are, and I already have a 34” 3 1/2K monitor. I can now have one monitor for both my Mac and the Windows machine at the same time on the same screen and with the switch of a button go full screen on one and use the other monitor for the other so I don’t need to keep booting back and forth. (But still gotta use 2 mice and 2 keyboards, getting pretty good at it now)
A few years ago my youngest son and I both built a couple of Windows gaming rigs and I needed a few Windows apps that just didn’t play well on the Mac OS. At least that’s what I told the wife anyway.

Like it’s been mentioned before, if you have any computer with a spinning HD get an SSD. You will really be surprised at how quick it boots up, not kidding. But get a larger one then you would think you need as the applications, games, etc are getting to be quite large and over time it will fill up much sooner than you think. Use your old HD as a backup drive.

Started out with the Apple IIe way back in the day and upgraded every other model or so. My 2010 MacPro is still my everyday usage and still running great. Just got a new graphics card a couple of years ago and can still play most of the games, at least on the mid settings. It is at the end of it’s life tho as far as 3rd party hardware/software. Well, even the Mac OS has left me behind. Lol.
I can technically go one more step up but it’s 64 bit only and I have too many 32 bit apps and games I use fairly regularly. The new MacPro’s just out priced me. Can I afford one, yes. Can I justify it as a hobby, no. Not sure If I’ll get another laptop for my “desk top” or the newer Mac Mini.

We went to iPad tablets when we went on vacation a couple of years ago and actually worked out pretty good. I hate using the smartphone but the larger tablet worked great. Used to lug the laptop, charger, etc, around with us and decided to try something else. We are gonna be gone on a month’s (?) long “Walk About” this summer around the states so I might still bring the laptop just so the wife can do her major updating to her online crap. That will probably decide which to get.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

I think the desktop is now a dead end technology.

The technology is the same as a laptop, just a different and compressed form factor, which is what makes laptops more expensive, harder to modify. Lots of people prefer desktops so they can customiz.
But in reality, I do most things with a smartphone. I use laptop for video editing, CADD, spreadsheets.

 

[2manyrocks]

I will say that Smart Phones are NOT intuitive to use. And I like your use of the word "Intuitive." I have struggled with Smart Phones also. And I have been involved with computers for over 40 years. The menu systems make no sense to me as to how to navigate them to the place you want to go. Had a strange, and some what complicated occurrence with an old girl friend visiting my area. She was tethered to a phone for direction and recommendations. I was attempting to show her the unique things, that a google search could not find, that were off the track; and she had great difficultly following to these special places with out the phone to say turn here and there, which were all wrong. She is still a good friend, but It was difficult in the way she was using her phone to always say, "This Place," which I'd been to, and it was not the best. The Phone was directing her and telling her, at the same time, "This is where you go and this is the best," over what I was saying as more interesting.

The Phone Won. I still find this interesting, that an old friend, in my case, was ursuped by a cell phone.

My wife visited family in another state over the holidays. At one point, I remember her telling me that her family was sitting around the living room on their phones.

 

[Jaygyver]

What's funny is I hired into the Navy shipyard over here to get away from driving semi on the hwy the same time another fella started and he came up excited one day on finding some silly stuff he could do on the phone. So needless to say a mid 40's burnt out air traffic controller guy and a 60ish burnt out truck driver ended up sending each other things we could do on the phone. Giggled like 2 little girls.

 

[BravoXray]

When I first got into doing a little computer repair, sales and programming back in the 80s, The first hard drive I installed for a customer was 1 full height Hitachi 10MB drive. The drive and controller cost a little north of $1200.
How things have changed, M.2 NVMEs are getting cheaper all the time. Just bought a 256GB WD NVME SSD for $25.
An interesting thing I discovered when looking for a CPU and MB to upgrade a friend's old XP machine to WIN 10, was that the new Ryzen chips can be had cheaper the some of the older AMD FX processors.
I have an NIB FX8370 that would cost three times what I paid for it a few years ago.

 

[Xfaxman]

Here is another option for updating older computers, ChromeOS Flex: https://www.androidpolice.com/chrome-os-flex-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-use-it/

And I converted my Windows laptop into a Chromebook using Flex | Digital Trends

I installed it on my wife's old slow windows computer and so far, so good.

Does anyone else have any experience with it?

 

[kenmbz]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.
Using cassettes on early home computers to load programs needed to be planned due to the time it took to load.
I still use desktops as storage servers (pictures, videos, music) and for backups of all our devices from school chromebooks to iphones/android phones and various laptops.

For large storage requirements now, desktops are great, cheap and the larger cases can hold a lot of drives to present on the network. Both run Unix apps.

I don't always follow phone directions, sometimes veering off the path a bit and letting the phone calculate a new path, will take you to new places.

Directions on a phone are recommendations, I think some people don't understand that.

 

[MossRoad]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.
Using cassettes on early home computers to load programs needed to be planned due to the time it took to load.
I still use desktops as storage servers (pictures, videos, music) and for backups of all our devices from school chromebooks to iphones/android phones and various laptops.

For large storage requirements now, desktops are great, cheap and the larger cases can hold a lot of drives to present on the network. Both run Unix apps.

I don't always follow phone directions, sometimes veering off the path a bit and letting the phone calculate a new path, will take you to new places.

Directions on a phone are recommendations, I think some people don't understand that.

I still have two of the large platters from our Dec washing machine. People think they're some sort of record. No, that's a disk from a disk drive. Something ridiculously small like 64mb per platter. Can't recall.

And you're not exaggerating when you say they were the size of a dishwasher. But they're actually a little larger.

Found this a few minutes ago....

 

[MossRoad]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.
...

That reminded me of the first day I worked at the Newspaper back in 1987. They took me into the computer room to show me around, then yelled at me for walking too hard!

WHAT?

You're walking too hard. You have to walk gently on the raised floor near the DEC drives or your footsteps will crash the drives.

And never pull the chair out from the DECWriter LA120 printer console too fast, or slam it back in, because you'll crash the hard drives.

And never let the door to the computer room slam, because you'll crash the hard drives.



Jeeze, it was like walking in a mine field.

 

[WinterDeere]

I think the desktop is now a dead end technology

I guess it depends on how you define "desktop". Engineers doing design and simulation work will continue to favor high-power localized computing for the foreseeable future, and there's only so much you can pack into a laptop, budget aside. I typically have a row of several Dell 7800 or 7900 workstations ganged up on or under my desk, and we still (if errantly) often call them "desktop" computers... they sit on our desks. Yes, they're marketed as "Workstations", but using the word always feels too pretentious.

At some point, this work may largely move over to cloud computing, a'la Azure. But looking at that trend over the last ten years shows its failing to live up to expectation for most engineering applications, with regard to cost and flexibility (not to mention software licensing), when compared to a $6k - $10k computer sitting on each engineer's or designer's desk.

 

[JasperFrank]

When we got Work Stations to refurb, they were a difficult sell. You had to explain that these were designed to the cutting edges of their time, and in most cases , far beyond what any desk top was designed, to do, and designed to work 24/7. So yes, its a 7 year old machine, but this computer when new, was 8 thousand dollars and built with the best materials and engineering available. It will still out perform anything you can get at a big box store for 500 dollars. And we couldn't sell them for 150 dollars.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

You still need a workstation to get to cloud computing.

 

[Oaktree]

Like it’s been mentioned before, if you have any computer with a spinning HD get an SSD. You will really be surprised at how quick it boots up, not kidding.

I replaced the HD in my laptop with an SSD a couple years ago, and it does boot up a lot faster. Especially appreciated because I primarily use it at worksites and there's less waiting around when I need it. I'm sure it also makes for longer battery life, though I've never tested that.
Of course the first one failed after 6 mo. or so and it's a PITA to get at where the drive is located to re-replace it.

My wife visited family in another state over the holidays. At one point, I remember her telling me that her family was sitting around the living room on their phones.

Maybe 10 years ago a woman I worked with mentioned that her daughter had some friends over. She said it was creepy...no one spoke to one another, they just sat in the same room sending text messages.

 

[WinterDeere]

You still need a workstation to get to cloud computing.

Not really, just a terminal. A nice $500 machine can provide access to computing resources similar to a $20k- $40k machine (i.e. multi-GPU machine). But there are other issues, surrounding both graphics, costs, and licensing.

When we got Work Stations to refurb, they were a difficult sell. You had to explain that these were designed to the cutting edges of their time, and in most cases , far beyond what any desk top was designed, to do, and designed to work 24/7. So yes, its a 7 year old machine, but this computer when new, was 8 thousand dollars and built with the best materials and engineering available. It will still out perform anything you can get at a big box store for 500 dollars. And we couldn't sell them for 150 dollars.

Hah, yeah... I know this scenario. My old computers (and those of the rest of the R&D staff) would continue to live in the building with most employers, at least 10 - 15 years beyond purchase. I'd be done with them after 2 years, for my tasks, but they'd make a kick-ass CAD station for another 5 years after that, and a damn good general computer for admin's or production staff after that. There were a few CAD guys who knew enough to know they were getting a better machine than they'd get otherwise, but not all of them understood.

What always blew my mind was the cost of some of the graphics cards used by the CAD guys. They'd take a $6k machine and put a $5k graphics card into it. My need for graphics was always much less, but I needed big GPU's for massive parallel processing tasks. There are certain things for which 32 CPU's will never beat 4096 GPU threads.

 

[Oaktree]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.

I worked with them in the late 80s/early 90s myself. The disc packs in those old CDC hard drives had a whopping 300M capacity and weighed probably 30 lb.!! Now you can fit 512 G on an SD card the size of your thumbnail.

 

[Oaktree]

That reminded me of the first day I worked at the Newspaper back in 1987. They took me into the computer room to show me around, then yelled at me for walking too hard!

WHAT?

You're walking too hard. You have to walk gently on the raised floor near the DEC drives or your footsteps will crash the drives.

And never pull the chair out from the DECWriter LA120 printer console too fast, or slam it back in, because you'll crash the hard drives.

And never let the door to the computer room slam, because you'll crash the hard drives.



Jeeze, it was like walking in a mine field.

Yeah, when I started my first tech job right out of college in 1970 the company used drum memory. Probably half again as big as that DEC drive you showed the picture of and a capacity of 8 M!!! Sheesh, you could barely put a Word document on something like that today, but back then we thought it was huge. They too were very sensitive to vibration, and unlike a drive if you had a head crash it had to be sent back to the factory.

 

[WinterDeere]

Jeez... you guys are old.

"I remember when we stored data on a Victrola!"