I got a little excited about our new computer. You might be wondering why. Well, it replaced our old computer, which was a rather geriatric seven and a half years old! Even I had forgotten that it was that old.
So what does almost four iterations of Moore’s Law give us?
Processor: From a Pentium III 800 MHz to a Core2 Duo 2.2GHz. That’s 2.75 times faster but there are two processors so it could be argued (wrongly) that it’s actually 5.5 times faster. There are much better ways of measuring processor performance but I’m not going to get into that now.
Memory: From 128Mb to 2Gb. That’s 16 times as much and bang on Moore’s prediction! (I did triple the memory to 384Mb on the old machine some years back, it should be noted.)
Disk: From 15Gb to 320Gb. That’s 20 times as much! I find it interesting how disks are growing faster than memory, which is in turn growing faster than processor power.
Graphics: I’m not really clued-up enough to comment on this properly but the on-board memory of the graphics card has risen eightfold from 16Mb to 128Mb. I can, at least, run Google Earth now without the machine grinding to a spectacular halt.
Screen: From a 17″ CRT at 1024×768 to a 22″ flat screen at 1680×1050. That’s 1.3 times as much, linearly speaking. Alternatively, in pixel terms it’s up from 804,864 to 1,764,000, which is 2.2 times as much.
Anything new? A DVD re-writer in place of a CD-ROM drive. Eight USB2 ports, half of which are on the front, instead of two USB1 ports tucked round the back. Headphone and microphone jacks on the front.
Anything missing? A floppy drive, a serial port, a parallel port, a reset button and the sound of a Harrier Jump Jet taking off all the time it’s switched on. Good riddance all. Oh, it didn’t come with Windows, either. I bought this computer from Dell with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed instead and saved some money in the process. Now I have a desktop that looks like it comes out of a Hollywood movie. (Although switching some of these effects on does feel a lot light strapping a neon light to the bottom of your car.)
What this adds up to is a very nice to use machine that boots up in half the time of the old one and does surprising things like rip a CD in four minutes without breaking a sweat. The best bit, though, is the price. I got this phenominal set of upgrades in a machine costing 40% less than the old one. Sometimes, modern life is not rubbish.