[compuryan]

I had a revelation a couple weeks ago. It was that I had more computer than I needed. I used to play lots of games but I ran out of time being at college and basically just got out of it, and quit playing computer games all together. But I still had a pretty beefy computer sitting in my room. Here were the specs:

Intel C2D Dual Core E7200 2.53ghz 45nm
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L
2x1GB GeiL DDR2 1066 RAM
ECS Nvidia 8800GT 512MB graphics card

At this moment a couple weeks ago I realized that all I did with my computer was browse the web, listen to music, write papers in Word, and occasionally get on Skype or AIM. Although I sometimes spend a lot of time on my computer doing these things, I don't exactly need an 8800GT under the hood of my computer to do it. So when I got home for spring break I swapped out all of the hot gaming components for some old parts I had laying around to see if I could live with a less powerful computer. I also went back to Windows XP to ease the load on the system instead of the flashy Windows Vista that I had been used to. Here are the specs of what I am using now:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
MSI nForce2 Motherboard
512MB DDR 400mhz RAM
Nvidia TNT2 32mb AGP Graphics Card

And I couldn't be happier. The 4-5 year old components work just as well as the shiny new ones do. And I am just as content with Windows XP as I was with Vista. I'm actually happy to be back on XP. There aren't pop-ups from windows every 20 seconds asking me if its okay if windows opens a file or downloads an update. I've held on to my 500gb hard drive and my creative audigy 2zs, but everything else I've thrown up for sale on some computer forums.

I made this post to see if anyone else realizes how the technological world is always telling us to upgrade upgrade upgrade. Computers keep getting faster and faster and faster. What was hot and fast four years ago is now an old piece of crap. I have discovered for myself that that is not true. I am getting along just fine on my "old crap" Athlon XP 3200+ machine. Unless you are playing games or using intensive processing applications, maybe the $1000 Mac, Dell, or HP just isn't necessary, don't you think? I mean, everyone these days it seems has to get a computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor because its just so darn fast. Well... let me think about what I do again: I open Mozilla Firefox, Foobar2000, and occasionally something else. A $15 Pentium 3 could do just as good a job with those applications as a $150 Core 2 Duo could. Do we all need super computers? I don't.

 

[m0ofassa]

Of course we dont. I have a gaming rig and a smaller rig with all my sound stuff so i can listen for long durations wihtout worrying about the power bill

 

[shigzeo]

i am perfectly fine with a 1ghz ibook with 768 ram: in fact it flies! for what we spend most of our time doing, we are overkilling on energy, money and carbone footprint. my macbook pro will probably not be upgraded by the purchase of another macbook pro but rather go down to an air or if a netbook eventually gets released by apple.

just way too much stuff i don't use anymore: like you, i no longer game except with my DS and my iPod Touch.

 

[kyleisgreat]

Why do you think netbooks are so popular right now?

 

[Suntory_Times]

Well, I use my laptop as my media center (inlcuding as my primary blu ray player), so I do need a relativly fast computer to be able to have jitter free playback. But I don understand what you are saying.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kyleisgreat /img/forum/go_quote.gif Why do you think netbooks are so popular right now?

Because there small and cwute.

 

[linuxworks]

lately, I build 'down' not up. quiet and hopefully even fanless.

here's my latest 'computer'. very fanless, very low power:

lol - its called an 'arduino' and its an embedded cpu that runs free software that you write in C. they even have ethernet dongles for it.

I think it has a whole K of ram. yes, 1k of ram onboard.

'fast computers' are easy and boring. so last century.

'slow and fanless' is where its at, man

 

[compuryan]

lol thats cool. I love minimalist things.

To Suntory_Times, yes you are right, decoding Blu Ray movies demands some power for sure, that is a good reason to have beefy components.

To kyleisgreat, I love netbooks, I kinda want one but I don't have any need to go mobile. And not to mention my lossless music collection wouldn't fit on any netbook

.

 

[shigzeo]

for me (a guy who hits the road often and writes or takes pictures or commutes by bicycle) a normal laptop is a bane to safety, to weight distribution etc. a netbook with a decent keyboard would be my key to so much productive work!

as for minimalist no-fan operation, i was looking into it back in 2002 with not much luck as there was not much focus on it then but it seems times are changing. brilliant and i hope the trend continues. my first computer had only a power supply fan but that was already in 1994 or 1993, so the time of power hungry computers was just dawning.

 

[linuxworks]

my real fanless box is an epia VIA system (7watts) in a mini-itx box.

with the new ssd's being pretty cheap and mostly usable (even 40pin ide, 30gb was $75 for the notebook size drive) - its not hard to be 100% silent now.

I have that itx box in the bedroom acting as a music/spdif player. fanless is finally a reality with no major hacking needed. I can watch dvd's on that EPIA but it falls down on even mpeg2 HD from OTA.

the newer atom-follow-on (if they ever get a real chipset to run that neat cpu) will be even better for HD, with video accel in the video card, unlike my EPIA box that has s3 unichrome video (blech).

 

[Suntory_Times]

What kind of hd, broadcast HD, or blu ray HD. As they require vastly different levels of power to process.

 

[sachu]

I gave up my laptop for a pretty decent setup..

E6750 2.66GHz overclocked to 3.33GHz
Gigabyte EP-45-UD3P
4 x 2GB GSkill 1066 MHz memory
1 EVGA GTX 260 896MB graphics card
750 watt pC and power cooling power supply (darn thing was 170$ when i bought it ..worth it though)
a 28inch HD monitor to top it all off..
WinXP 64 and Ubuntu 64, Centos running on it..

I play games occasionally but for the most part for general programming stuff, writing documents, movies...But my project in school might make some real use of the GTX260 as I will be using it as a GPU General Processing Unit) vai the CUDA framework..

But there is no way I will go back to a slower system...I however seem to use the S3 mode a LOT..

 

[fameh]

Obviously much people when buying new computers, they need one and spend too much money for the things they do: surfing on internet, a couple of movies, email, messenger and burn CDs with Nero...

But i think its a circle: better hardware allows better games. Better games demands new hardware.
When we are happy with the 700Mb rip movies, then someone jump to 2x 700Mb CD rips. All of us are happier and say "hey, they are prettier, i prefer them". Now we go to the blue-ray and the .mkv Matroska recoded videos. 5-14Gb/movie. Insane. But owning sexy. And you need quite good CPU to be able to see that with no delay. My laptop wasn't able.

Music? yah. Since some years ago storage is cheaper, so yeah, we love to store a lot of CDs in FLAC. This was impossible to think some years, not very far ago, when we had 2Gb or 16Gb of HDD.

What about monitors? Years ago 15" or 17" "flat" was awesome. I bought a 22" panoramic some months ago. Impressed then. Well, atm im not. Next one will be bigger, 24 or so. xD


It's always required to think what are you going to use for your computer and spend based on it. But it's fair all of us like quality in game, in movies or in a prettier Operative System. That makes the things grow so fast, imo.

 

[LFF]

I soooo need a super computer. For those of you who don't need one and have one - please PM me. I'd be happy to trade my P4 for a Core 2 Duo. I do some heavy audio processing and I need the speed.

 

[sachu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by linuxworks /img/forum/go_quote.gif lately, I build 'down' not up. quiet and hopefully even fanless. here's my latest 'computer'. very fanless, very low power: lol - its called an 'arduino' and its an embedded cpu that runs free software that you write in C. they even have ethernet dongles for it. I think it has a whole K of ram. yes, 1k of ram onboard. 'fast computers' are easy and boring. so last century. 'slow and fanless' is where its at, man

This is my fanless "computer"..an FPGA development kit (Nexys 2 )

 

[mark2410]

OP, your so ont eh wrong site if you going to ask about NEED. lol many many things we dont need but we get becasue we want.

that said for years my media box that migrated to being my main box then i nuked the bios on my xp2800+ box and couldnt be bothered to fix. a big part of why i took till last year to upgrade from it was soundstorm. it was fantastic for DDL and i loved the way in which it functioned. still vowing to not buy anything from nvidia till they bring soundstorm back