Richard Stacpoole (rstacpoole@iinet.net.au) on 9/18/09 wrote:
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>But you do not get the same components between a $2000 (and weren't we talking
>$1500?) machine and a $600.00 machine. Built in 802.11n? Range of ports? Dedicated GPU? Bluetooth?

My HP Pavilion has the 802.11n. The AMD chipset has
decent 3D graphics, good enough for my purposes. Lots
of USB ports. No bluetooth.

>Laptops are not obsolete in 2-3 years unless you really >use all of the processing
>power of a computer. And lets be frank, the number of >people who do is dwindling
>rapidly. These machine have to last longer now that they >can run current software
>so well. Replace the battery and the hard drive and I >expect them to work.

Well, this is my 4th laptop in 8 years. I wouldn't be
keen to use the 300MHz P2 or 600MHz P3 ones any more.
The Acer with 1.6GHz Centrino was ok, but the keyboard
was broken, the cooling got jammed with fluff and when I
took it apart to fix that, I didn't get the touchpad
hooked up. And I wanted to dabble in Second Life, which
required some decent 3D graphics support. What's going
to make the HP obsolete ? I don't know yet - maybe
USB3.0 devices; maybe more demanding 3D stuff; maybe the
arrival of truly silent machines with SSDs and passive
cooling. Maybe a faster WiFi variant; or eSATA disks ?
But I'll bet the machines in 2011 will make it look shabby.

>For a personal machine that is fine, but when I was the support guy we got our
>capital grants in three year cycles. So if the computer didn't last that long it
>was a major headache.

Indeed. Accountancy rules are ill-adapted to dealing
with fast-changing technology. I see that as an argument
for changing the accounting rules, not for buying
expensive machines.

>As long as you can get it to that nice RAID between >leaving for the trip and the
>hard drive failing.

Mostly I'm just using it as a VNC client, accessing
sessions back in my employer's machine room. The
network is the computer.

>and even less excuse for these thing to fail. They should be good for 6 or more
>years with only a battery change at three.

Yes. Like the iPod. But then, just like the iPod,
there's a new version with desirable new features every
couple of years ...