I submit that my aunt's PC is six years old and has huge globs of dust in the floppy drive and several layers of dust on the motherboard but it still works.
This brings up a totally unrated issue, but WAY too many people forget to actually clean their computer, not just their harddrive. Computers will last ALOT longer if you clean your hardware once or twice a year. All you really need is a can of compressed air.
I submit that my aunt's PC is six years old and has huge globs of dust in the floppy drive and several layers of dust on the motherboard but it still works.
This brings up a totally unrated issue, but WAY too many people forget to actually clean their computer, not just their harddrive. Computers will last ALOT longer if you clean your hardware once or twice a year. All you really need is a can of compressed air.
I've been reminiscing about Computer Shopper all day, thanks to Scott. I used to read that mofo from cover to cover every single time a new one came out. There was a time that I could have told you the specs on anything in that mag -- back when I was working on building my first computer, ca. 1994.
The differentiation between chips in the "33" era was amazing. I remember moving from a 386 33mhz to a 486 66mhz and being blown away by the difference. The benchmark improvements between the subsequent 133, 166 etc. models were huge leaps and bounds. In college, I built an AMD 800mhz for about $800, and it was teh awesome machine (how, oh how, Rym, did you end up paying $4,000 for yours? I mean, damn, mine was shit hot and had all the fun gadgets -- CD/RW when it was revolutionary, a 64mb 3D card when they were still fairly xtreme, etc.)
Then there was that awkward period of about two years where everything went fucking crazy. It jumped from 300mhz standard to 800mhz, and then finally the Ghz line was crossed. Now, buying a 2.3Ghz machine is nothing.
There was talk, however, that there was an uncrossable threshold simply because of the heat and because of transmission speeds inherent to silicon. Is that still an issue? Or was that an old wives' tale?
I thought you might be amused to know that there are in fact levels of unicycling which go from one to ten. I'm proud to say that I have all the requirements to be a one, and a few of them to be a two.
Comments
The differentiation between chips in the "33" era was amazing. I remember moving from a 386 33mhz to a 486 66mhz and being blown away by the difference. The benchmark improvements between the subsequent 133, 166 etc. models were huge leaps and bounds. In college, I built an AMD 800mhz for about $800, and it was teh awesome machine (how, oh how, Rym, did you end up paying $4,000 for yours? I mean, damn, mine was shit hot and had all the fun gadgets -- CD/RW when it was revolutionary, a 64mb 3D card when they were still fairly xtreme, etc.)
Then there was that awkward period of about two years where everything went fucking crazy. It jumped from 300mhz standard to 800mhz, and then finally the Ghz line was crossed. Now, buying a 2.3Ghz machine is nothing.
There was talk, however, that there was an uncrossable threshold simply because of the heat and because of transmission speeds inherent to silicon. Is that still an issue? Or was that an old wives' tale?