Save your cash. We used to have to 'load up' a computer to be sure it would still be viable several years later when we could afford a replacement. These days, however, things change way, way too fast for that. The lowest end device you can get in 5 years will make a mockery of anything you buy today, no matter how overpowered.
A new $350 Walmart sale unit will out-perform a $1500 monster from 2005. There's no way to know if anything we can buy today (at any price) will still be even minimally useful in 5 years. So my new philosophy is to buy cheap now and then again when the current devices are no longer useful. This allows us to keep in the running on new technology as it becomes available rather than being stuck trying to make due with ancient equipment that we spent a ton on. Some things to keep an eye on ... - SSDs will become standard as capacities climb and prices fall - The BIOS as we know it will soon be museum fodder - Light Peak technology may make USB, SATA, DVD, and Blue Ray devices obsolete - Cloud services and virtualization may remove the computational elements from the devices we touch, leaving us holding simple "connection devices" instead - in which case today's powehouse computer may look like an ENIAC. On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 1:58 PM, <tmcl...@argenta-oreana.org> wrote: > We are ready to purchase a few workstations with the new Intel processors. > What chip sets do you recommend for users who do lots of multitasking and > data analysis with spreadsheets and websites? Would a low end i5 be > sufficient or should I bump up to an i7? These workstations will have a 5-yr > warranty so I want to be sure they will still have some power beyond the > first couple years of use. > TIA, > Tammy > > Tammy McLane > Technology Coordinator > Argenta-Oreana Middle/High School > 200 E. East St. > Argenta, IL 62501 > phone: 217-795-2163 x.1326 > fax: 217-795-4502 > > > > > > > > | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org | > | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org |
