On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:31:13AM -0400, Matthew Hunt wrote: > > >From my point of view, a computer is something that needs to be > upgraded every few years whether I use it for photography or not. > Some portion of the expense can be "charged" to photography, but not > all of it. I guess it depends on what all you use it for.
I don't think that's true any more. I used to upgrade a computer every two years or so, alternating between our two machines, so a computer used to get four years of use, of which two were as the main system. But the machines got to be so powerful that I could continue to get useful work out of them beyond that time. In fact the last two machines (a regular home machine, and a notebook for work) both served for six years before being replaced (although the notebok did get disk and memory upgrades to max out the configuration). I'd consider it quite reasonable to assume that anything bought today, as long as it isn't a really low-end system, should be capable of being used for at least five years. The one thing that argues most tellingly agains that position is the speed with which solid state drives are becoming viable; it may be that relying on rotational storage for the system drives will make a machine bought today obsolete faster than it otherwise would based on processor and system bus speeds. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
