Don't make Dave come over there!

<grumble>

Though, for the record, I am a big fan of Linux. And I even like MacOS.

Not a bad price for a space heater with two cupholders.

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I still have an XP VM image (running on my Linux home server) for a few specific old pieces of software (there's no direct connection to the internet from it, just file sharing out to the Linux host... no antivirus on there, and it's only caught up to SP2), and occasionally Microsoft's XP mode for older games that don't run OK on Windows 7 or where they force full-screen and I'd rather run them in a window.

Out of curiosity ...

Exactly what do people think I am surely doing in order to justify their scorn about these woefully inadequate computers?

Inasmuch I find them perfectly adequate for my life, what does everyone think I'm missing?

No gaming, no real-time video production, Office 2003 (at the latest; some machines use Office 2000. Both are able read/use almost anything I find, and all my spreadsheets recalculate in a trice). Seriously, folks; given that a 2013 computer is probably very much faster than my 2005 P4, my computers do everything I ask of them in a more-than-acceptable period of time. Why would I feel obligated to shell out hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to do something faster that is already fast enough?

The difference between a 5-year old computer and a brand new one is noticeable. The difference between a 5-year old computer and no computer at all is infinite.

I do not feel driven to grab every cool application out there. Though I make my living using/designing/etc computer applications, I have a real life outside of that.

^^^

It is just another tool to get things done. It will only be replaced if something does the work better to justify the additional expenditure.

When you stop looking at is as a tool and as a toy or a must have then you have lost sight of the financial and time cost of buying the latest, quickest.

When people find out that I was a professional photographer I would get drag into the Canon vs Nikon debate and what is the latest must have gadget. I have never seen a photograph from these people, just snapshots for Facebook taken with a expensive camera.

I notice people like Ansel Adams, Steiglitz, Cartier-Bresson, etc. Have photographs hanging in galleries all over the world. Used film. Manual focus, aperture, etc. Black&white.

How could Joe Rosenthal grab that shot at Iwo Jima doing it all manually?

How could they have possibly done it without serious computation power, Lightroom, internet availability, helpful comments from their Facebook friends?

Boggles the mind.

Next thing you'll tell me is that my $300 sneakers won't make me a superb athlete, or my $45,000 car won't be a chick magnet.

There goes the American economy.

Arrrrh, the difference in bragging rights - owning & driving a BMW or Audi vs. a Ford or God forbid, Hyundai - all of them fine for cruising 62+ mph/100 km on the autoban, freeway, highway, motorway, etc. Mine is very happy on regular and theirs on premium 93 octane only of a particular brand only, etc.

CP Chairman Mao would say, that's symbolic of the materialistic & capitalist world - some family folks are very happy with a 300 sq.ft. flat (apartment) in Paris, London or Hong Kong - whereas the spoiled sole traveler brat would complaint about their 450 sq. ft. hotel room not being upgraded to the 675 sq.ft. junior suite as a FT & platinum exclusive club member.

Don't mind them as it is mine and mine alone to use - and when I'm ready to upgrade and replace it, it's my choice unless they want to pay for mine. (And, in many instances - those laptops that I see up in J/F were not even paid for as their employer(s) foot the bills for theirs to lug around, what a pity.) Time to get off before we are get into trouble for crossing into Omni & the warnings.

Case in point - Dell Latitude D410, Pentium Mobile CPU, 4:3 XGA screen, upgraded to 2GB & 250GB HDD, dual boot XP and W7 Ultimate - working dial-up modem with RJ-11 jack for emergency access (try that with a new laptop, ha ha) and it's perfect anywhere, docking station at home is hooked up to a 22" monitor. Has been working continuously for last 8+ years as my personal laptop w. occassional tune-ups - can't beat it at all.

In terms of newer software, or hardware?

In terms of hardware, if the machines are fast enough for you, and you don't mind the inflated heat and electrical usage (which was particular to the Pentium 4 generation of Intel processors, not to older machines in general), and it runs the software you want/need, there's nothing wrong with it.

In terms of software, if you're using it off-internet, and you're satisfied with the user experience, great. Sufficiently old software should NEVER be connected to the internet directly or used to browse any but the safest sites on the public internet -- both put not only your machine but other people's at risk.

There's also the question of user experience. I find XP to be a very dated pain in the neck, and unlike some of the simpler Linux UIs (which have the benefit of speed and simplicity to make up for their limits compared to say Cinnamon or KDE) doesn't even have reliability or speed speaking for it.

Back when I used XP, reinstalling Windows because something corrupted itself was pretty much an every-6-months activity. Vista or 7 are MUCH better at maintaining itself, and firewalling applications from one another such that the OS and/or applications don't get corrupted. They also finally started catching up to real multiuser OSes on security and the ability to safely share the machine with other people, which is irrelevant on a true single-user machine but very helpful if you ever share them.

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IMO, speed is fairly generational. A 2ghz first-generation Core 2 Duo or 3ghz Pentium D is pretty much the slowest machine that's been tolerable with generation of software that's been out for about the 6-7 years those machine have been out. Those were fairly high-end machines at the time; they're now a little faster than the very lowest-end new machines.

At the same time, the very fastest single-core machines available at the same (3.8ghz? P4-based Xeons) I generally find intolerable. We've still got a few kicking around at work, and if you put two physical processors in them they become tolerable -- although they'll be pulling over 200W just for the CPUs.

In the past 6-7 years, memory capacities needed have gone up (2gb is no longer really fine) but the basic processor speed needed hasn't changed much for the OS or for browsers, or for any of the other common apps.

Probably the very low hundreds.

A 5-year old computer is generally fine today; that puts you in 2008, and unless it was an incredibly low-end one at the time, you're looking at a dual-core system, a modern processor, and at least 2gb of RAM.

I make my living writing software; back in '09, when we were looking at new hardware, we benchmarked the old hardware vs. new. Doing a regular clean build (not even the most onerous sort, with libraries and code generation) had gotten up to about 15+ minutes on the old hardware -- on Linux, worse on Windows thanks to the weaker filesystem and antivirus. The new hardware was just over 5. We would typically pull and do a clean build on our own systems once daily, maybe twice if there was a really big change.

If we call a developer's time worth $40/hour (probably a bit too low on average base salary, and way too low fully burdened), and ignore all the other time savings/productivity benefits to the speedup (or the morale benefits!), 10 minutes a day over a 180-workday year (after holidays, vacation, meetings days, working from home, etc) equals 30 hours waiting on the machine in the first year or about $1200.

Add in the other benefits, and the slightly-over-$2000 machines we were getting at the time were probably paying for themselves in the first year.

For desktops, the newer even faster machines we started getting last fall (like many companies, we're on a 3-year depreciation cycle) are about $1300 now. The speed difference, lacking a big generational bump, are incrementally faster (a bit under 50%) rather than 3x faster, and I don't know anyone who much cares whether they have the new machines or the 2009 vintage ones. (We could buy 8-core machines now, but they're not cost effective and lose quite a bit of peak single-core speed relative to the fastest quads.)

For laptops, back in 2009, we couldn't get a laptop anyone wanted to do serious development work on our product at any price, from any manufacturer, and the closest you could come weighed a ton and resembled a space heater. When the first decent laptop processors for our purposes came out in early 2011, it was a really big deal.

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For general, non-development use, I have a couple of Lenovo T200s at home which were being e-wasted at work. They're about the slowest processor I'd recommend to anyone (2nd-generation 1.86ghz Core 2 Duo), but they're perfectly usable even for my impatient self, have great battery life, and are super light and portable. Add in a cheapie $100 SSD, and you've got something very competitive with a brand new ultrabook.

Have you seen what new large-format gear costs today? Let alone what vintage large-format gear like most of them were using would cost on the used market? (Hint: some of these things appreciate, unlike most electronics.)

Taken with a Speed Graphic camera; I can't find the early 1940s price, but the list price in 1947 was $250, or over $2500 in today's dollars (by CPI; probably twice that in real cost equivalence). That's a SERIOUS piece of gear (and one which, while it hasn't appreciated as fast as inflation, if it's in good condition is probably worth more in nominal dollars today than it cost new then.)

The costs and space of assembling a physical darkroom, inhaling toxic chemicals, and a lot of practice...

I'm willing to bet that almost every single one of them -- like almost every artist in every medium (a VERY few self-taught exceptions aside) -- received a whole lot of feedback from others to develop their skills to the point where they make it look easy.

Facebook is hardly the best medium for that, but online sharing is for many people what dropping a few 3x5s into an envelope for grandma used to be -- it's just a whole lot easier, and has a (largely) fixed cost for internet access rather than an on-demand cost for development, printing and postage.

I was in charge of a project several years ago, developing cooling systems for military usage of commercial computers (the MIL-grade stuff usually comes much later than the commercial stuff). The big problem at the time was cooling the Pentium III's. We were concerned that the P4's would glow in the dark. As it turned out, the P4 was better on power consumption/heat generation than the P III.What are you talking about? What 'old software' is dangerous to use? To attach to the 'net I use IE8 and Chrome. Acrobat Reader XI for .pdf's. Run videos with VLC. I don't know what's safe to use on porn sites because I don't visit them. Virus software running all the time, all security updates in place. And, I tend not to visit sites that are 'popular' because they're also popular with virus-writers.

Just a dull old geezer, I guess. "User experience"? What the heck is that. It's a friggin' computer - it's not supposed to entertain and delight me. Everything I've wanted to do I figure out rather quickly and then do it.

I've never had to re-install Windows except one time when I was downloading a driver and clicked on one of those download sites. In the process, ntldr got smoked. Didn't know what to do then -- I do now.

Other than that, never had to reload.

And I don't share my computers ... why would I? My wife doesn't even know or care where the on/off switch is, my daughter knows enough to play around on her laptop, and all the other kids are gone and have (many, many) of their own machines.
To a certain extent, I do too.

But I'm not involved in large projects; small embedded systems, useful utilities, test scripts, etc. They have me do it because I actually understand how computers (and electronics in general) work. I don't like depending on a compiler to do magic. I had to write one once for a language I developed - it ain't easy, and mistakes happen.

By the way, when you work in the so-called 'defense industry', the developer's time is not irrelevant - it's crucial that it take as long as possible, because that's what they bill Uncle Sam.

Beyond that, most of the time I spend with computers (for enjoyment) is my own - it's not a question of what my time is worth - I'm doing it because I enjoy it! I don't live my life in 15-minute billable increments. Just sitting in the back yerd, having a beer, and watching the squirrels in worth a lot to me. I don't take deadlines very seriously.
That's probably hundreds of dollars I could be using for a week or two on the beach at Beaulieu. Why would I want to spend it on a piece of rust and sand? To shave milliseconds of my calculations?

Look - I'm not trying to rag on you. Just as when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. When you spend your days in a software development environment, you develop a 'philosophy', if you will, of what's acceptable for a computer. Just as in America, where we take clean water, sanitation facilities, availability of good roads, air travel, etc. so much for granted that we don't even question them, likewise in the world at large there is a much wider range of attitudes and applications for computers than you might run into on a daily basis. Frankly, I don't care how slow or fast the machine is. If it does what I want in a reasonable period of time, I'm happy. Especially if I got it for next to nothing (I've never understood the notion that if you're not spendin' money, you're not alive).

That's true. I started my 'serious' photography hobby with a Busch Pressman. 4X5, with those film holders, Got the complete darkroom setup (trays, chemicals, enlarger, etc.) from a co-worker whose father was a photographer and had passed away. I think I paid about $100 for the whole setup.

In the process, I learned a lot about photography - chemically and optically. It was well worth it.
At f/11, 1/400th, IIRC.
You can avoid the toxicity - most photographers knew how. And the 'practice' is what we call 'learning'.
Absolutely. The difference is, the people they talked to actually knew what they were talking about. I have no trouble getting inundated with advice from people who really don't know Jack, (but are pretty sure they do.) Your experience is probably similar.

Re-Install XP every six months?

I've got one computer in the house that's got an inservice date of December 2002, and I've never had to reinstall XP on it.

There's another one in the basement that's from 2003, and the only reason that had XP reinstalled on it was it was a dump from work, and everything that went out was wiped clean.

I can't think of a time at home I've ever reinstalled XP on computers with an average use of eight or more years except for when installing a new hard drive.

You shouldn't. If what you have is working for you, stick with it. There's no need to buy a new machine because the operating system is no longer supported.

Only in computers is it acceptable for a company to stop support for something that has a close to 40% market share because it's newest product only has a 3% market share.

If there's something down the road that you can't do with your current machine then consider upgrading. But if you can do what you need to do then don't worry about it. Your XP will keep running just fine probably for many years to come.

No need for that.

When I change hard drives, I clone the original to the new drive, I use XXCLONE. It can make the new drive bootable, too.

Once you clone it, connect it as the prime drive and boot up. Voila! You're in business; all your apps are in place, all the drivers are installed, just plug and play.

Yes, I have three older drive with XP that I cloned as backup. Plug the HDD in and Play!

I think I did it before cloning software was readily available for different size drives. Now I use true image, not sure why I picked that, it was probably included with one of the enclosures.