Letter to those who won't read this. It's time.

[ochadd]

As of this day December 21, 2009 I declare your Pentium III dead. Your 256 megabyte ram stick and slow hard drive die with 2009. RIP.

You will be happier, more productive, more intelligent, and an over all better person by upgrading. Should you find yourself turning on a computer more than once a week you need to purchase or steal something else. No more excuses. If money is tight and don't want to steal one you are better off selling your TV and canceling the cell phone to finance it. You have spent hundreds of dollars making it limp along. You have been gouged for memory upgrades and repairs. It's time to leave that all behind. There is nothing else that can be done.

Make it dual core and make it SSD. For all that is good in this world let it be 2 gigs or more.

Signed
Your PC repair guy

 

[Ayah]

Heh. The life of a tech support person.

 

[ochadd]

Times are tough so decided to do some computer repair work which I haven't done in quite some time.

This last weekend I got a laptop in that was a Pentium III, with 256MB of ram, and the slowest damn hard drive I've ever had to work with running XP pro. Chkdsk, removed a few long out dated apps and packages, updated Windows, installed some antivirus, and defragged. Took the machine a solid two days. She supposedly uses this machine all day every day.

The time I spent working on it was nearly unbearable. I was tempted to tear the screen off and buy her something new. I've been running a dual core forever it seems. Also been on an SSD for a long time as well. It's not right what some people are willing to endure.

 

[Ayah]

Probably a 4200rpm hard drive.

I think I have one of those laying around here somewhere.. But yeah, they're pretty damn slow compared to modern mechanical hard drives let alone an SSD.

 

[ecom]

Probably a 4200rpm hard drive.

I think I have one of those laying around here somewhere.. But yeah, they're pretty damn slow compared to modern mechanical hard drives let alone an SSD.

No kidding. The 5400 RPM 2.5" IDE drive I bought in 2007 or 2006 for my laptop is faster than the 7200 RPM 3.5" drive I had in my Athlon XP desktop from 2001.

 

[In2Photos]

As of this day December 21, 2009 I declare your Pentium III dead. Your 256 megabyte ram stick and slow hard drive die with 2009. RIP.

You will be happier, more productive, more intelligent, and an over all better person by upgrading. Should you find yourself turning on a computer more than once a week you need to purchase or steal something else. No more excuses. If money is tight and don't want to steal one you are better off selling your TV and canceling the cell phone to finance it. You have spent hundreds of dollars making it limp along. You have been gouged for memory upgrades and repairs. It's time to leave that all behind. There is nothing else that can be done.

Make it dual core and make it SSD. For all that is good in this world let it be 2 gigs or more.

Signed
Your PC repair guy

Can I print this and put it on my boss' desk? Yes, we still have P3s, and P4s. We only have two machines in this office that are dual core and they run circles around the other machines.

 

[neutralizer]

Better yet, wipe that hard drive and reinstall because it seriously drives up my patience when I have to wait the hard drive to load on boot up and when I do anything because its just thrashing.

 

[Fayd]

Can I print this and put it on my boss' desk? Yes, we still have P3s, and P4s. We only have two machines in this office that are dual core and they run circles around the other machines.

one of the machines i did work on 2 years ago was a pentium 2, 300 mhz, 64 mb ram. they asked me to edit a .doc for some reason, and the machine didn't have enough RAM to open the file.

 

[In2Photos]

one of the machines i did work on 2 years ago was a pentium 2, 300 mhz, 64 mb ram. they asked me to edit a .doc for some reason, and the machine didn't have enough RAM to open the file.

OUCH! The slowest we have here is a P3 450mhz, with maybe 256MB of RAM. It takes 30 minutes to boot every morning running win2K Pro.

 

[Yowen]

haha, I remember that happening with my dads old laptop at work. Also I recall shutting it down took a while as well. I am glad they switched to XP + new laptops, is it true that it doesnt take quite as long? Was there ever a good reason for 2000?

 

[themisfit610]

Old machines can be perfectly usable. If you have P3 450MHz with 256MB of RAM (which was a HOT SHIT machine when win2k came out), there should be no way it takes more than a minute or two to boot up. Rebuild it, put your tech skills to good use

Not to say that a machine like this would be able to handle modern web browsing with flash etc... but for office work, it's perfectly fine

~MiSfit

 

[In2Photos]

Old machines can be perfectly usable. If you have P3 450MHz with 256MB of RAM (which was a HOT SHIT machine when win2k came out), there should be no way it takes more than a minute or two to boot up. Rebuild it, put your tech skills to good use

Not to say that a machine like this would be able to handle modern web browsing with flash etc... but for office work, it's perfectly fine

~MiSfit

I'd love to rebuild it, but the boss doesn't care since he isn't the one using it!

 

[mmntech]

People's attitude is why should I buy a new one when the old one still works, no matter how slowly. A lot of people without any tech knowledge still think you need to spend $1000 on a new system even to do basic tasks. It's the same reason you see people driving around in a rusted out, patched up 1990 Ford when you can buy a brand new Kia for $10,000.

Of course there are the people who genuinely can't afford something new. A computer just isn't a priority/necessity for them.

 

[spikespiegal]

I recall running a lot of Citrix and Terminal Servers on P3's...some even P-Pro 200s.

700mhz P3 with 512 meg of RAM could handle half a dozen office desktop sessions with fairly snappy performance. P-Pro 200s were also pretty snappy with NT4.

This doesn't show how much hardware has come along. It shows how absurdy bloated today's software has become. You now need a dual core with 2-gig of RAM to open the same office document that 10 years ago would open *faster* on a Pentium 300 running Win98.

 

[Yowen]

It does amaze me every time I do a ram upgrade how much it matters. Or starting fresh with a new installation of Windows. But I do remember the days where I could have 128mb or less and PIII 900mhz and run win98, the internet, office, play the latest games back then. Now I need 10x that ram to make my winXP machine seem snappy.

 

[piasabird]

I still have a running 1.2 gig Celeron. It runs about as well as the first P4 that came out. I more or less retired it. It still has some files on it, but no one uses it. My new system has a E7200 cpu and 2 gigs of RAM. I think the integrated graphics are better then the video card I had on the celeron.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

It truly is torture. I remember as a techie at Cleveland State University back in 2001, I sat down at a windows 95 machine. It was like the captain going down with the ship per say. He was the head of some department and was holding out on upgrading to save money. I have another real horror story that is sickening to me till this day; i bet now I could fix it but it was a new job to me and I wasn't the bold type with computers back then as I am now. I was doing an install and I had to pull a plug out of the socket for the professor. I didn't trace the tower cord down to the plug. Well, while the OS was installing, I pulled the wrong plug shutting down the whole setup (facepalm)

 

[garritynet]

I had a story about a friend who wanted me to do a $600 upgrade her Mac G4, because she owned software that she had never installed nor had any use for but would cost thousands of dollars to replace with new versions. Then I realised what really gets to me.

People using 15" CRTs from 1996. Thats what bugs me the most when I am fixing someones computer. I'm not talking about computers from that time period or the elderly or anything like that. I mean like modern computers owned by regular 40ish adults hooked up to tiny 15" displays that had the contrast way turned too high for the past 2 decades. You can get a 17" crap LCD monitor from any Microcenter for $80 that will look worlds better than your horrid, blurry, nightmare tube.

Or that yellowed, decades old ball mouse that won't track right? How do you own a machine that came with Vista installed and hook it up to that crap? Why are you smart enough to have PS/2 -> USB adapters but not smart enough to replace the mouse? Why didn't the machine come with a mouse? Is it still in the box? Why aren't you using it?

 

[Yowen]

lol, I still use CRT because I am a college student with a broken laptop...