Dedicated Computing
I can now fully admit that I was wrong...well kind of.
A few years back, I thought the answer to my computer problems was dedicated computing. By that phrase, I mean that I would have each system specifically devoted to each task. While hardly space efficient, it did get the job done. The computers back then had limited power and storage space, and it made sense- at the time. I had one computer devoted to music, another to digital imaging, and a third for internet surfing. Thus when one crashed, I had plenty of redundancy, and the rest could keep going. This concept was also reinforced by the fact that a desktop couldn't handle too many peripherals at once or it became unstable, like very unstable. Like get out the Windows system disc for a reload unstable. My digital imaging desktop connnected with my scanner and my digital camera, but when I added more to the mix, it would crash and require a full hard drive wipe, and operating system rebuild.
Boy, have the times changed. Now with a new WinXP computer, and a capacious (Is that a word? I'm using it anyway!) hard drive, I think this concept of dedicated computing is bunk. Also, USB peripherals are a lot more stable than the old parallel port stuff ever was. Even two parallel port devices on one computer was too much hassle for both me and the computer. Now one computer can handle just about as many peripheral devices as most users will ever own, and have the hard drive space to store everything associated with it, with room to spare.
So what to do with the leftover beige boxes? One route is to set up the old box as a home theatre PC. If that is not for you, then consider donating it to someone who could really use it. Thankfully, we simply don't need so many desktops around anymore.
--Jonas
A few years back, I thought the answer to my computer problems was dedicated computing. By that phrase, I mean that I would have each system specifically devoted to each task. While hardly space efficient, it did get the job done. The computers back then had limited power and storage space, and it made sense- at the time. I had one computer devoted to music, another to digital imaging, and a third for internet surfing. Thus when one crashed, I had plenty of redundancy, and the rest could keep going. This concept was also reinforced by the fact that a desktop couldn't handle too many peripherals at once or it became unstable, like very unstable. Like get out the Windows system disc for a reload unstable. My digital imaging desktop connnected with my scanner and my digital camera, but when I added more to the mix, it would crash and require a full hard drive wipe, and operating system rebuild.
Boy, have the times changed. Now with a new WinXP computer, and a capacious (Is that a word? I'm using it anyway!) hard drive, I think this concept of dedicated computing is bunk. Also, USB peripherals are a lot more stable than the old parallel port stuff ever was. Even two parallel port devices on one computer was too much hassle for both me and the computer. Now one computer can handle just about as many peripheral devices as most users will ever own, and have the hard drive space to store everything associated with it, with room to spare.
So what to do with the leftover beige boxes? One route is to set up the old box as a home theatre PC. If that is not for you, then consider donating it to someone who could really use it. Thankfully, we simply don't need so many desktops around anymore.
--Jonas
posted by digitaldoc at 6:40 AM
2 Comments:
Speak for yourself, I still use multiple boxes, they all have a different OS, and all have different jobs. It's more software related then hardware.
Unfortunately my Linux testing box drowned recently. Truthfully, I can't say I miss it all that much right now. If you're the only user, a desktop and a notebook, if powerful enough, should be more than adequate for most needs (this doesn't include DVR duties, of course...).
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