Post by spacegold on Feb 6, 2007 11:52:20 GMT -5
I know some of the all knowing tenstars here will probably come on with "no big deal", but there might be something of interest to someone in this post.
The keyboard on my old laptop finally gave up the ghost. So I went down to Wallymart and laid down $755 for a new desktop unit. That is about the same money I put out 30 years ago for an Atari 800 with one 8" floppy drive. It had 48K memory, no hard drive, no monitor, no modem. and the operating system was built into the machine. Ya kept your stuff on 60K floppies, and hooked the computer up to a TV. Nobody knew or cared how fast the processor worked. $800 then was about the same as $2500 today.
This time I got a CD player/burner, a DVD player/burner, 894 MEGabytes of memory, 200 GIGabytes of hard drive, a dialup modem, Windows Vista operating system, and a 19" flat LCD screen that has so much real estate that ya hardly notice the 1-1/2" clock up in one corner. The processor works at 2.2 Ghz. This is not to mention tons of utility software and stereo speakers in the monitor.
The downside is that Vista uses half the memory and feels a bit clunky until I get used to it. Also there turns out to be a small driver problem with the mouse. The scroll wheel does not work. And it does not have a floppy drive. Don't even think of getting Vista on any machine with less memory.
It was only three hours between the time I handed the clerk my credit card and being on the internet.
What a joy, having such a fast processor and big screen. The large memory really helps with surfing the 'net with the dialup connection, too, because the machine doesn't have to go to the hard drive to cache web pages.
The keyboard on my old laptop finally gave up the ghost. So I went down to Wallymart and laid down $755 for a new desktop unit. That is about the same money I put out 30 years ago for an Atari 800 with one 8" floppy drive. It had 48K memory, no hard drive, no monitor, no modem. and the operating system was built into the machine. Ya kept your stuff on 60K floppies, and hooked the computer up to a TV. Nobody knew or cared how fast the processor worked. $800 then was about the same as $2500 today.
This time I got a CD player/burner, a DVD player/burner, 894 MEGabytes of memory, 200 GIGabytes of hard drive, a dialup modem, Windows Vista operating system, and a 19" flat LCD screen that has so much real estate that ya hardly notice the 1-1/2" clock up in one corner. The processor works at 2.2 Ghz. This is not to mention tons of utility software and stereo speakers in the monitor.
The downside is that Vista uses half the memory and feels a bit clunky until I get used to it. Also there turns out to be a small driver problem with the mouse. The scroll wheel does not work. And it does not have a floppy drive. Don't even think of getting Vista on any machine with less memory.
It was only three hours between the time I handed the clerk my credit card and being on the internet.
What a joy, having such a fast processor and big screen. The large memory really helps with surfing the 'net with the dialup connection, too, because the machine doesn't have to go to the hard drive to cache web pages.
