Thursday, February 14, 2008

Updated thoughts on home computers

After our move several of our desktops - older machines but still in and around 3.0 GHz single pentium iv processors didn't survive the move. I'm wondering how the movers will repair or compensate.

What we had left was:

1. My old laptop 3.4 ghz high performance pentium laptop with x800 graphics card - is a good laptop - miserable battery - more of a laptop replacement - just died.
2. an old 3.0 ghz desktop i had reconfigured from being a file server to a desktop
3. my personal laptops for work and home

I'm thinking that subsequent computers may be laptops. I've always chased high performance desktops, but the new laptops have nice landscape monitors and are pretty fast in the procesor department.

The only shortcoming is their usual lack of a dedicated high performance video card, but then again I really never play computer games any more, so it's less of an issue. Furthermore, the prices are pretty reasonable, not much more than what I would spend on a custom built pc (say around $1200).

I expect I'll buy a new laptop for my wife before the year's out. I'm hoping my old desktop replacement laptop (the 3.4 ghz) is still working - as it has decent speed.

What would you do? Would you focus on desktops with faster performance or laptops with better integration and protability?

Regards, makingourway

3 comments:

Jose Anes said...

I use both. But then again, I have a small computer business at home. About 10 desktops/servers and 3 laptops.

One advantage of using desktop is the multi monitor options. I love working on four monitors.

Money And Investing

Terry Lange said...

Since you have wired your home for networking capabilities, laptops would be better. They are more mobile. You could take a regular desktop and convert it to a server and have all the laptops networked to it.

Anonymous said...

A bit OT, but you may also consider using your old lappies as servers. Low power, low noise, battery backup, and keyboard/monitor built in. I've moved to using 2 older lappies as my web and file servers repsectively, and couldn't be happier (reduced my power bill by a few bucks per month, too).

I've moved totally to laptops now (a mac and a thinkpad), the difference with towers for most tasks is minimal, except for processor intensive tasks, like video editing, which I don't really do enough to warrant owning a tower. Just make sure you've got a nice video card for external monitor driving, and enough usb or firewire ports to boost storage.