It dawned on me recently that my main home desktop is coming up on seven years old. SEVEN YEARS. I used to be happy if I got four years out of a computer and here I am at 7 years and I can’t come up with any reason why I’d need to upgrade. I took a look at CPU benchmarks and stuff in my price range would only be a ~30% increase of what I have now. Increases in RAM speed and major increases in SSD technology would definitely give me an improvement but I can’t say that I’d notice it much with my use case. I love getting new computer gear, but I think it’s going to be a while before that happens again.
This seems like a good excuse to update my computer ownership history though. The ones in italics are still in use.
- 1998 – Gateway Pentium 2 350 with a 10GB hard drive and a tape backup.
- 2002 – Dell P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. $900
- 2006 – Dell Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive. $1200
- 2010 – Core i7 860 2.8GHz quad core with 8 GB RAM. $1000 (Replaced motherboard and CPU ins 2014 for $260)
- 2011 – Lenovo Thinkpad Edge $700
- 2012 – Core i7 3770 3.4GHz quad core with 16GB RAM. $1400.
- 2013 – HP Pavilion Touchsmart 15-b154nr AMD A8-4555M quad core 1.6GHZ and 6 GB of RAM. $550
- 2015 – Dell XPS 13. $800
- 2016 – Intel Core i3-6100 CPU with 8GB RAM. $360
I suspect that the next thing we’ll replace is the laptop only because that gets more abuse than the desktop machines. I’ve been very happy with the XPS 13 though. It has held up much longer than our previous laptops and isn’t showing any signs of impending doom.