Maggie's Farm

 
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Actually, no, you don't need to upgrade anything*.

*with a few possible exceptions

Most articles you read on the subject take the opposite approach. My Gawd, man — two months have gone by! Of course you need to upgrade! Or, to take a different approach, if an upgrade's out there, then, logically, it must be better than your current version, therefore you must upgrade!

Cow cookies.

Not only does upgrading seldom make for a real demonstrable improvement, especially with software, but half the time it makes things worse. The typical example is some favorite function in a program that they've decided to 'improve' by making it automatic and now it doesn't work correctly for your particular application anymore. That kind of stuff happens all the time.

And with hardware, more often than not there's a trade-off involved. Yeah, that shiny new LCD monitor sure takes up less space than that gigantic CRT you had before, but now the picture isn't as sharp or responsive. And yeah, that new keyboard or printer or mouse easily plugged right into that USB jack except — oops — you're out of USB jacks. And that USB 'hub' you bought is really flaky and your printer doesn't always work. It seems like there's always something.

Since most people are usually thinking about upgrading some part of their rig — if not the whole thing — I'll skim through the various categories and you can pluck out the info you want.

The Whole Enchilada

Let's tackle the big boy first. I've traditionally upgraded piecemeal over the years (a motherboard here, a CD-to-DVD upgrade there), but this last time I decided to just saunter into Circuit City and buy the fastest thing on the shelf. I ended up with a top-of-the-line Compaq and while it ran just perfectly, it did come with this horrible flaw that I, as a computer professional, spotted immediately and knew the foul demon would have to be exorcised:

Windows Vista.

The problem is, this isn't a particularly easy problem to fix. While installing Windows XP isn't rocket science, it's not for rookies, either.

So, right at the outset, Vista is the big snag with buying an off-the-shelf computer these days. Windows Vista is so universally despised that Microsoft has already moved up the target date of 'Windows 7', their next generation of Windows, by a few years.

If you want to buy a brand new rig, I presume there are still online companies selling older models fitted with WinXP. That's the route I'd go. Go ahead and look around town if you want, just to get a feel for the various brands, but avoid buying one that's loaded with Vista. There might be a few small computer stores around that still have XP machines in stock, or they might swap Windows on the machine to close the deal.

There's another aspect to buying the whole rig that I want to cover, but I need to explain a statement I made earlier.

For normal computer use, like writing letters and surfing the web, the CPU speed of the machine is somewhat irrelevant. It's not going to make your web surfing any faster and it's certainly not going to improve your typing skills. Basically, it means you'll be opening that Word document approximately 0.0037 seconds faster than on your old machine.

The one place where CPU speed really does make a difference is converting video from one format to another, known as 'rendering'. If it takes 4 hours to render a full-length movie on your present machine, it'll take 2 hours on a machine that's twice as fast. So saving 2 hours is a real demonstrable difference. Being heavily into video rendering, a fast machine is a 'must' for me, hence my buying "the fastest one on the shelf".

For normal use, I'd recommend a middle-of-the-road machine. You don't need to spend the super-bucks on a super-fast machine, but, by the same token, you don't want a cheap piece of crap, either.

'Bigger' and 'Faster' Have Had Their Day

First off, I'm not blaming the manufacturers for hyping their products. You've got to have some selling point, and traditionally Bigger! and Faster! are two of the heavies.

I discussed the Faster! issue up above in regards to CPU speed. Unless you do video work, buying a computer solely because it's Faster! would be a serious waste of money.

The same is true with memory and hard drive space when it comes to Bigger! The 'memory' of a computer is like a 'thinking area' where the computer can store files as long as the computer is turned on. Each program uses a certain amount of memory when it's run and Windows, itself, uses a big chunk.

In other words, you use a relatively finite amount. At most, you're only going to open five browsers, two word processing programs, two web editors, three graphics programs and four video programs at the same time — and there's the finite amount of memory that you'll ever need. 256 megs of memory should cover just about anybody.

Then new machines started arriving with Bigger! memory; first 512 megs, then 1,000 megs (a gig), then 1.5 gigs, and now 2 gigs.

So a new machine today has roughly eight times more memory than you'll ever use. There's your Bigger! in action.

If your machine seems to be running slow and someone tells you "Just add more memory!", click on the 'My Computer' icon with the right mouse button, open 'Properties', and see how much RAM you have, down near the bottom. If you have at least 256 MB, it's something else that's slowing down your machine.

Hard drives have followed the same path. Unless you're saving video clips, a gig or two of hard drive space would last most people a lifetime. When it comes to relative sizes, pics and emails and text files are all extremely small.

But that little fact isn't about to deter the manufacturers, no sir! The next thing ya know, it's 5-gig drives, then 20, then 60, then 120, then 250, then 350, then 500, and now we have 1,000 gigs — a terabyte — on the horizon.

By the way, you know what I heard?

I heard you're nobody unless you own a hot new terabyte drive!

Pass it on!

Peripheral Devices

Keyboard — If you're thinking of upgrading your keyboard, I would suggest you buy one with a PS/2 plug, not a USB plug. The manufacturers are doing us a tremendous disservice by shuffling the peripheral devices like mice, printers and keyboards over to the USB port. Not only is it flaky (Windows XP has an acknowledged USB bug), but USB hubs are even flakier and the only reason they're doing it is to reduce costs, both for the devices, themselves, and the towers and motherboards. If it's a wireless keyboard or a fancy one with extry goodies, then it'll have to be USB.

Mouse — If you're thinking of upgrading to an 'ergonomic' mouse (one that conforms to your hand), make sure you actually rest your whole hand on the mouse while using it. I only touch mine with my fingertips. The thing I like best about my Logitech is the way the scroll wheel acts as a double-click button.

Printer — Printers have made some serious leaps in recent years. If yours is four or five years old, chances are even the cheapest printer at OfficeMax will outperform it.

Another thing that's made a big leap in recent years is the software that comes with the printer. Your print-out is just a tad on the red side? Nudge the 'Red' slider on the color scale down a bit and try again. Ditto adjusting the brightness, contrast, etc.

ROM Drives

If you tend to burn a lot of discs and are thinking of upgrading to a unit with a faster burn speed, remember that this comes with a trade-off. In general, the slower the burn, the better the burn, so if disc longevity is your goal, burn slow. I use 8X for DVD disc, 16X for CD.

Disc Storage

As long as we're talking about discs, if you're thinking of upgrading your disc storage system, I like the carousels.

Speakers

If you're going to be playing music on it and actually want it to sound like music, buy a system with a subwoofer.

Actually, I'm in the market for this, myself. I'll probably post a bleg later for brand names. I'm looking for something digital where I can adjust the volume to a certain percent via the LCD display.

Updating Older Windows

What if you're still running Windows 98 or Windows Millennium? Should you update to XP or Vista?

Don't be silly! Why would you? Is everything working fine? Then there's no need.

Besides, there's a 95% chance that your old machine won't support either Windows XP or Vista. For starters, you probably don't have enough memory, and probably not enough hard drive space. By the time you had those two items taken care of, you've bought a new cheapie machine at Best Buy.

What'll drive you to upgrading (both your Windows and computer) will be a pressing need for something like broadband. You'll move to an area that's only serviced by Comcast and it turns out their broadband software doesn't work on Windows 98 or ME. Other large broadband companies might be the same. So, you'll bite the bullet, hock one of the kids and buy the new rig. You can't say you didn't know the day was coming.

Similarly, if you have some pressing need to use Vista and are worrying about the jump from XP, you should be. From what I can glean, overall, things will run about the same, but you'll run into a few very persnickety snags and bugs here and there in various programs, and maybe one of your older peripheral devices won't work if the company hasn't written a Vista driver for it. Thousands of printers and scanners bit the dust when XP hit the scene because the companies didn't update all of their older drivers, so be prepared.

There are web forums that have entire sections devoted to "Vista Problems", so you should be able to dig up an answer to any specific problem you're having. (it says here)

Programs

In general, I'd put this in the same 'No by default' category as hardware. While the software companies are throwing the Newer is better! pitch at you, the question you should be asking yourself is:

What good will it do me?

Or, to ask the question a different way, if your program is already working "perfectly" — how do you improve upon perfection?

You'd better take a real good look at that 'Updates' list on the web site before overwriting your perfectly-working program, and I'd be making an image file of the system before doing the dirty deed. If I found that the new version had ruined my favorite function, I'd have True Image writing that image file back in a heartbeat.

As a small side note, it's better to rewrite the entire system via an image file than uninstall the new version and reinstall the old version. Not everything gets un-tweaked in the Windows Registry during an uninstall and it's possible the old version might not work properly. Just another reason why the image file backup system is so superior to other backup systems.
 

One exception to all of this is any type of security program, such as anti-spyware or anti-virus programs.  When they say there's an update available, do it.  They usually have auto-update features, but occasionally the actual program might need to be downloaded and installed.

Summation

To me, it's always a matter of practicality. Whether a piece of hardware or software is 10 minutes old or 10 years old really doesn't mean anything. Want proof?

• I'm using one of the latest, hottest Flash players out there on my site. It's definitely superior to the stock Flash player. Cutting edge, baby.
  
  


• There are, as of this moment, 989 web pages on my site, and every one of them was written with a web editor that's ten years old.

"BURN HIM!!"

The only question is, "How is it working?" In the case of a good Flash player, I found the stock one decidedly lacking and went on the hunt for a better one. In the case of a web editor, I've tried tons of them over the years and none of them are better than this creaky, 10-year-old version of Netscape Composer I use. The mere fact that I use it to put the very latest in modern online streaming media on my site is proof enough that "old" means next to nothing.

Upgrade when you want to and it's fun. Not when some ad or neighbor says you should.

See y'all next week!