WyoCo / HearIt / Trabing

How long should a computer last?

People ask me how long they should expect their new computer to last. Two years? Five years?

Over time I have found the answer to that question can be broken down into two parts.

Part One

This is simple; a computer will last as long as the software needs of the user don’t exceed the capabilities of the computer.

If you purchased a PC to run Microsoft Office 2000 in 2001 and that is all you will ever do with that computer than all you really have to worry about is the hard-drive crashing or some other catastrophic disaster (which is Part Two).

The problem is you may be forced to use software that exceeds the capabilities of a perfectly functioning computer.

Let’s say you own a business and when you bought that computer you installed QuickBooks Pro 2000, but you now need to upgrade to QuickBooks Pro 2008.

Don’t even think about loading QuickBooks Pro 2008 on that computer.

That computer you bought in ’01 won’t run QuickBooks Pro 2008. Your software needs now exceed the capabilities of that trusty computer that has served you so well until now.

Or take for instance anti-virus security software. If you run out and buy McAfee Antivirus or Norton Antivirus you will discover neither will install on Windows 98. Not that there isn’t antivirus software available for Windows 98, but you can’t load McAfee or Norton.

You see Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 98 on July 11, 2006. Due to Microsoft’s decision to stop supporting Windows 98 most commercial software developers stopped building software that will install and run on Windows 98.

That might not see fair, but that’s the reality.

As long as you only need to run software that was built to run on your computer that computer will not become obsolete, it will last nearly forever.

Unfortunately the odds are extremely great that at some point you will be forced to buy new software and the useful lifespan of your computer will come to an abrupt halt.

Part Two

A computer is a machine and how long it will ‘last’ depends on the parts of the computer.

If you back up all your data (and we all should) any competent computer repair person can build you a machine with which to load your operating system and restore your data.

If you are interested, or if you have a need, you can check out eBay and look at all the old computers, and old computer parts, for sale. Many online auction sites sell old computers and old computer parts; it is possible to keep an old computer running for the foreseeable future.

The bottom line

It is not a good idea to keep a computer for more than 5 years. Between Microsoft, Apple, whatever strain of Linux or BSD that you embrace, there are just to many changes over a five year time frame that push computer hardware past it’s pleasant usefulness. While it may be possible to keep a computer running for 10 or 20 years I wouldn’t recommend going that direction.

Some people have unlimited financial resources, most of us don’t. The longer you own a computer the more expensive and frustrating you will find it is to have it repaired as the machine approaches antiquity. Computer technicians come into the field and move on, finding a computer technician in 2008 who knows what to do with Mac OS 7.2.2 or DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 not easy.

So my advice is to save $200 to $300 a year for a new computer you will buy every five years and stay on top of the technology.

A $1000 dollar computer is a pretty sweet machine, and your friends won’t make fun of that TRS-80 when they visit.

Programming et. al.

So I’m getting back into programming a little. The AJAX thing looks interesting. Web 2.0 and all that jazz.

Then again I am faced with the prospect of living in Kaycee Wyoming where learning a programming language is akin to picking up advanced skills in sailing ship design. Nice, but when will I get a chance to use it.

Well, the answer to that is my own web stuff. And it really doesn’t hurt to keep somewhat abreast of what is going on in the way of web programming in case a really great contract comes my way.

Programming used to be pretty – well – simple. There was Fortran, Pascal and those other structured programming languages with there conditional statements and stuff.

Then came along Java, that was my first object oriented language and here were all these libraries. Like an idiot I have written huge functions that did things I later discovered a existing library did.

Now comes AJAX which seems to be a blend of Javascript, XHTML, XML, CSS, a DOM thingy and perhaps other beasties.

What’s will there be in five years? It seems as though the Web 1.0 stuff was pretty simple in comparison to what is going on now and heaven help me when the Web 3.0 technologies rear their ugly heads in 2015.

So tonight I’m just getting going on JavaScript, not that I haven’t used JavaScript in the past – but not in the context of AJAX.

Seriously, if I didn’t think it sounded impressive telling people I was going into AJAX development I probably wouldn’t even be looking into it.

At this time I am not sure what can be done in AJAX that can’t be done in PHP, but there must be something. Right?