With great power comes big credit card bills… or so they say.
Do you think the speed of computers these days is more than enough for the average web surfer? Or are computers still hampered by their speed? Sound off in the comments below.
Enjoy the latest ‘toon!
-Krishna
It depends on where you are looking for “speed.” If one is talking about CPU speed, yes, the average CPU is far faster than most average users need. The bottleneck is currently the buss. It doesn’t matter if your CPU is pushing 4GHz if you have a 1 GHz bus. :-) Unfortunately this is the spec most overlooked by average users.
I think, in terms of computing power, computers have come along way. A Pentium with 32 MB ram and win98 was painful! I have a C2D E6420, 2 GB ram and XP and for most tasks it’s plenty. The only thing that is still not quite there is video editing, especially since resolution went from 307,200px to 2,073,600px!
I also think we need to abandon all the legacy buses and interfaces. I’m glad parallel and serial ports have been removed as well as 3.5 floppies. ATA instructions are a burden and need to be replaced. After 31 years x86 needs to be replaced as well. There has to be much more efficient instruction sets that don’t have the licensing baggage!
It’s been a long hard road for tech… and a there’s always something new around the bend… I’m used to it.
But what really gets me cracked up…
PLAQINTOSH PRO!!!!
L-VIDIA!
LOL!!!!!!!!
And all to blog and play solitaire!!!! I think I know that guy!
Haha! Excellent comic Krishna. That is so true today with salesmen conning the buyer into buying something he or she doesn’t need, and then they go brag about things they have no idea what it is does. Really funny!
Solitaire, on a Plaqunitosh? We play Chess! :P
Burt’s a recent ‘switcher’. ;)
It is pretty stupid these days. The last system I setup my parents with is an AMD dual core 2.0ghz (X2 3200) with a 250gb hard drive and 2gb of ram. It’s been… Well. Years since that upgrade. And I can’t forsee another upgrade unless something blows up.
They are using possibly 20gb of hard drive space. With what they do, if I swapped their system out for the most expensive setup you could possibly imagine, you would not be able to notice a speed increase.
Actually, on the Mac there is a very good solitaire package called Burning Monkey Solitaire. I have BMS3. Yes, you can run it on Windows too, but it looks nicer on the Mac.
the only bottleneck i run into on my low powered netbook with daily activities is watching some of the higher quality flash video (such as you tube). anything else runs just fine.
on the desktop, i don’t do serious gaming but the game i do play run fine (Civ 4, age of empires 3). the only issue i have is storage space.
“After 31 years x86 needs to be replaced as well” – Well, Keane you’re painfully right, but how would that happen? Intel was trying to do something like that with Itanium, but then it would be necessary to rewrite all software – so I can’t see anything like that in the near future (though linux can run on other platforms – the switch would be easier for that OS). The changes in 2012-13 will be more than enough (the GPU and CPU will become one ;).
Of nowadays computers, I have little experience. Both my Turion X2 laptop and AthlonXP desktop are more than enough for what I use a computer, that is, for surfing the web, word processing, videos, and coding.
… But my parents are fine with an old 600MHz Duron, and are fighting against its replacement :)