What is the useful life of your machine?

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Bob Muir — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:21:27 GMT

Good question Keith. Personally, I'm using a Dell Inspiron 8200 lappy that will be 4 years old in March. I paid something like $3k for it new and a year or so ago I paid another $1k to boost the processor speed up to 2.4ghz and the memory up to 2GB.

I think it's more because of the memory size, but Vista runs just great on it. I'm using it as my remote workstation, running VMware and supporting my end users/clients remotely with RDP, PPTP/VNC, and Bombar.

Like you, I'm holding out for the next-gen laptops before I upgrade. Again, I'll probably spend around $3k and hopefully it will last another 3 or 4 years. So these things are averaging me $1,000/year.

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Linda Moore — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 20:39:25 GMT

I am currently using a Dell Latitude laptop right now that is a little over 4 years old. When I bought this computer, I got maxed out the RAM at 1 GB. I believe that you get more for your money and extend the computer's life by buying top-of-the-line computers.

Like you I also want to be able to run x64 applications.

I will probably purchase a new top of the line "Santa Rosa" laptop during the 4th quarter of 2007.

Currently, if you have a laptop with 4 GB, only 3 GB is addressable because 1 GB is reserved for the OS.

Pertaining to the Intel Santa Rosa technology, how much of the 8 GB RAM will be addressable by applications?

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Keith Combs — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:58:35 GMT

The PCIe bus will take approximately 500meg of memory. The system will also allocate memory for video, even on discrete based systems. Most people are seeing 3.25 free on a x64 4GB RAM machine today. I would imagine the allocations will be similar on a 8GB x64 machine.

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Keith Pawson — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:27:47 GMT

"I tossed a laptop on the trash today"

Keith, I'm not a pro green person, however, I hope next time you send it to a green recycle place or whatever you have over there in the US.

Cheers

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Keith Combs — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:10:32 GMT

Actually it was a figure of speech. I have a car load of books I'm taking to the library. I am also taking three laptops, two monitors, batteries, and other assorted stuff to the office for pc recycle.

I'm not a total loon. :)

Austin Mar.1

Jack Barry — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 14:34:35 GMT

Attended your presentation, excellent!

You mentioned there were three downloads we needed to get. What were they?

Thanks,

Jack

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Keith Combs — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 18:38:27 GMT

See http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2007/01/29/office-2007-pro-bcm-download-mystery-solved.aspx for the office downloads I referred to.

re: What is the useful life of your machine?

Vic — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:03:57 GMT

My main machine at home for email, web surfing, image manipulation, and web development turned six years old this month. It's a Dell Dimension 8100 that shipped with Windows ME. The upgrade to XP was not pain free, but it wasn't a nightmare either. It's serves it's purpose well. I will probably replace it with a new box with Vista preinstalled in about three years as you recommend.