The sad state of home computing

[dmaze]

I have this computer, watertown. It's about three and a half years old now. Has a reasonable keyboard, two sufficiently nice CRT monitors. And I never really use it any more. Some of this is actual problem: the fan in the power supply is sufficiently noisy that I don't really want to wake anyone up with it, and it's kind of annoying to actually have running because of that. (And consequently it's not a good remote-login machine either.) But other things are just "the machine is old": I didn't think a 700 MHz Athlon would be too slow, but the desktop clearly underperforms my newer laptop (everett) on "things that take CPU power to render", like Gnucash (!) and Microsoft Train Simulator. Also, watertown's 20 GB disk, partitioned between Debian and Windows 98, just doesn't have the contiguous space anywhere for a reasonable Vorbis file collection.

Conclusion: Moore's Law hits, watertown takes ten damage in the usability department. This feels distressing to me, though I can't really describe why. For a few hundred dollars I could put in a new motherboard with a faster processor and extra storage, but is this worthwhile if I'll just use the laptop for everything?

Comments

[jadia.livejournal.com]

Are gnucash and microsoft train simulator really that huge? I don't use either of them, and I've been happy enough still with Ladle II, which is a 733MHz processor. It runs Matlab happily enough for me (and Quicken, which I suppose is gnucash's twin, for windows). (Where Ladle II fails is in the video card, which is hardwired into the motherboard, suck.) I mean, Cherry, my new 2.6Ghz machine is definitely faster than ladleII, but the programs I use don't make me chafe at ladleII's speed, really.

How much ram does watertown have? Can you improve the performance by adding ram? (Being a computer geek, you probably have considered this already. I'm just curious.)

It's distressing to me as well that a 4 year old machine is Just Too Slow. It just seems wrong somehow.

[dmaze]

Gnucash isn't that huge, but it goes through this huge amount of effort to draw bar charts which are only sort of pretty, and the effort is noticably less on the laptop. (There's also the irritation that gnucash wants you to save what graphs exist separately on each machine.) MSTS basically does continuous 3-D rendering. So when I got the newest monitor for watertown, I also got a nicer graphics card, but the frame rate is still kind of low (maybe 8 fps) at comparable settings. I'm pretty sure it's not the graphics card that's losing here.

RAM: has 256 MB. If I was starting anew I'd probably get more, but I haven't noticed lack-of-memory being the issue.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

I've avoided certain kinds of upgrade in the past specifically because getting used to a faster feel is addictive... But 20G is swapfest-level at this point :-) Noise is a much more real problem than people give it credit for; consider one of the power supplies from pcpowercooling.com as a way to fix the noise level, there. (I'm working on replacing several of my older minitower servers with fanless mini-itx systems that will end up being more powerful and about the same cost...)