Dekstop lifecycles

[MasterRacker]

What are people doing for lifecycles of their desktops these days?

In my case, way back, I used to try and get 5 years out of desktops. In the Win9x WinNT days, technology (both hardware and software) was moving fast enough that, for most users, we had to do about a 3 year churn. These days, I'm thinking that any machine purchased sufficiently large now, should last a good five years again. If Longhorn were closer, I might reduce that number, since that will require a lot of upgrades for MS shops. Otherwise I think hardware has gotten far enough ahead to handle any conceivable normal business use for quite a while.

As to whether smaller companies upgrade slower than larger ones - I think that really depends on the company. A small engineering firm will want the best possible hardware for engineers running solid-modeling packagages for example. Larger companies may have more budget but they also have more machines to replace so it's not necessarily easier to roll out upgrades. Really depends on what they're being used for.






Jeff
If your mind is too open your brains will fall out...

 

[jrbarnett]

Infintelo,

You say that, but when I worked at the company I referred to earlier, and was using a 64Mb P133 system, it outperformed the boss' P2 400 box with 4x the storage because of a configuration error on the network settings.
It also outperformed a P3 450, and all because some of the programmers who didn't know much about tcp/ip configuration, though that
a) using the DNS server at the ISP rather than the one on the server in the corner was a better idea which knows the names and IP addresses of internal servers, when the outgoing proxy server will resolve the external DNS names if needed.

and
b) If there is an onboard ethernet adapter as well as an expansion card (the networks used coax cable) it should be uninstalled and switched off, and DHCP error messages were set to hide, to minimise this fact.
This caused the 400MHz PC to take 2 minutes to get a folder listing off one of the servers, when the p133 took only a few seconds.

After I fixed those problems, they ran just fine.

John

 

[lionelhill]

Which makes some very valuable points:

(1) We users have every right to get miffed when we have to spend thousands on super-hardware to mitigate dodgy software or over-complexity of set-up leading to lack of likelihood of getting it right. (to be fair: microsoft do seem to offer increasing help for the home user with installing things. I pity small businesses trying to get small networks to work without proper IT staff).

(2) There's a lot of truth in the statement at the start of Numerical Recipes (aimed at the science community) that computer scientists and other scientists often differ in their attitude to a 30-50% loss of performance: most scientists are in the business of solving tomorrow's problems with yesterday's machines, while computer scientists frequently have it the other way round.

 

[infinitelo]

jarbarnett, my point is that the boss looked good even though his machine was technically inferior.
Hey put a 17" flat screen on his desk with a wireless keyboard and mouse, and run a really cool screen saver on a p133 and he would look just as good (if the case was new)
even if all he needs is a green screen telnet session to a bottom line report.

Perception of technical apptitude is what im getting at, yes we need the cpu cycles, but upper management needs phycological leverage when dealing with venders, customers, and even sometimes employees.

The value of this perception is harder to ROI than our jobs. I'd bet real money that it does have a major impact on the business.

if it is to be it's up to me

 

[AnanthaP]

With windoze, there's also the FUD factor. Micro$oft is going to stop supporting W95 and W98 for all except maybe security fixes. So all W95/W98 users have to migrate and that means more RAM, more disk space, new computer etc.

When did you last use microsoft support?

Co-incidentally, I used it last week to upgrade a W98 machine for foreign language support.

Source a friendly neighbourhood software hack, make a library of all patches or farm out the old stuff to a charity of your choice. Presumably they can use outdated stuff.

End

 

[robbieguy2003]

A few years ago (all the way from when windows 95 was released up until the launch of the original athlon) software was always ahead of hardware. If you went out and spent £1500 on a new 600mhz system with 256mb ram and a half decent video card some software would eat those kind of resources for breakfast. Especially if you're an unefficient programmer like me who has 10 windows open at anyone time.

The good thing now is that for £500 at trade you can get hold of a rocket fast athlon or p4, stick 1gb of ram in it, fairly decent video card again and develop away. Hardware is finally ahead of software at the moment.

You don't have to spend a fortune at the moment to get a fast machine so the lifecycle has came upto about 5 years in my opinion (obviously dependant on use but can be recycled for other staff that don't need as fast machines).

The news on the new windows longhorn seems to be that its gui runs on hardware accelerated direct x9. No problem, a geforce fx low end card (low end being with 128MB ram??!!?? seems wierd saying that) will set you back less than £50 now.

Getting back to the topic, as you can build a decent tower for sub £500 now i think the product lifecycle for an average desktop would be around 5 years...





Rob