Computer upgrades

I generally build and upgrade my computers myself--that way I control what I have, and get improvements when I want them as opposed to when someone else thinks I should have them. My requirements are different from other folks...

So on my Macintosh G5 tower, I've got an extra internal disk, 4GB RAM. It's about time to replace disks in there, because 500 GB drives are now under $100. The mind boggles...I mean, that's an ENORMOUS amount of space. The machine came with a single 160 GB, and I added another 160. They're pretty much full at this point.

The only thing you can do that actually takes that kind of space is digital video. Even with all my digitized CDs and the free music downloads (see blog a few months ago on that), the MP3s only occupy about 100 GB...I started doing digitial video 2 yrs ago, pretty much only to do the DVR bit and slice-n-dice commercials out of TV, or burn a classic old movie to DVD. I'm not making YouTube stuff :)

Digital video takes about 2GB per hour to record, so if you are going to keep much of it, you are going to really need some serious space. What I have does not cut it. Swapping the 160s for 500s will solve that.

My Powerbook laptop only has 80GB to start with, and while that's kinda full (about 15 GB open), that's not what it's for, so I ain't worried about that.

My PC, which I built from components, has about 600GB, but I'm not doing DVR there OR much in the way of music...that's my games and primary programming machine, so 600GB is serious overkill.

Terabyte drives are available already, and soon that will be the default size for desktop machines. Almost absurd, really.

That kind of storage capacity exceeds what you can actually use in your lifetime, if you aren't doing DVR. Think of it this way: the typical document you generate is maybe a megabyte or so. If that takes you a week, you can make 50 a year. During your life you can make a few thousand. Suppose you save an interesting amount of music, 100GB or so. and maybe another 100GB of photos (you can take 1 MB pictures a lot faster than you can create text documents). In fact, it brings you to the point where deleting files is not something you need or want to do.

DOS, Windows and unix (OSX, Linux) -derived operating systems all began back when storage space was infinitesimal in comparison, so the conception was that you never kept extra/different copies of things. And storage was expensive. Nowadays, what different would it make? None, and it might even be to your benefit NOT to be deleting things.

I spent a number of years with a couple of computers whose file-system worked with version numbers as part of file-names, so every time you saved, you got a new version number of a file. After a while you'd have quite a few...which could get to be a problem (in the 70s, I worked on one where the OS (some horror from HP) had multiple versions, but it didn't warn you about running out of disk space until you did so, and as the machine didn't do multi-tasking, you had to quit the editor, losing changes, then go to the file-manager, delete things, and back to the editor to start again...THAT was really annoying, but I wasn't the person who got burned worst by it). But these days, it really wouldn't matter much, and if ALL your software did autosaves, you pretty much would never lose anything.

And indexing of your disk and its contents ought to be a built-in function in the OS. If that worked, you'd have an easier time of finding old docs without having to be as careful about organizing. I'm better at organizing than a lot of folks, and I can't always find things (what did I call that doc? where?) Mac OSX 10.4's "Spotlight" and the Google desktop are good starts at this. Windows is bad by itself, only indexing filenames, although that's better than nothing. (ok, apparently now that's not true, it does some indexing on the contents, but it doesn't do a very good job at all on the filenames--should create a database it can match against rather than re-reading every single directory)

I'd like to put a more advanced video card in the G5, but as I don't play games there too much, what I have (ATI 9600) is adequate. Wouldn't cut it for Doom 3, etc, but that's not what I do on that machine.

On my PC, however, I have an ATI X1600 video, an AMD dual-core cpu, 600GB disk, DVD burner...the one flaw is that I don't have enough RAM. Would like to upgrade, but not sure what to do. Apparently the motherboard wants dual-channel RAM, which I don't have...I have one 256 MB stick, and one 512 MB stick of single-channel. The socket the 256 stick is in won't take a 512, the machine won't even boot with a 512 single-channel in there. So do I need to replace with dual-channels? Do I replace the 512 with a 1GB? What? These are PC3200 (DDR 400) sticks, which are not as common as they used to be, and not as cheap as newer/faster, and I can't upgrade them for speed reasons (I think I can't upgrade the CPU any further for speed either).

[Later: I got a 1GB upgrade for the PC that finally actually worked--back in the beginning when I built the thing it would not take a 512 stick in either socket, now it does, no idea why. That was September. In Nov, I got another one, also works right, and now I am showing 2 GB of dual-channel RAM. didn't get special sticks, just generic, but the boot-time msg says dual-channel. hooray! Will I see a speed diff?]

I'm running Windows 64 on the PC, which has a few other problems--cannot put a WiFi in it, there seem to not be drivers for that for any WiFi I might try...complicated by the fact that I build this in a micro-case, so I have zero expansion inside beyond what I've done...so the WiFi test used an USB WiFi gizmo...which turned out to work fine on the old PC my son uses, other than not being all that fast (I seemed not to be able to force it to be "11g" speed, no idea why).

Well, it's an endless pursuit. Son's PC was my previous one, I built the latest 18 months ago, and will probably build a new one again in another couple of years. I expect the reason for that one will be I need a dual-cpu, dual-core, and a big speed increase for some reason. I don't expect to replace either the laptop or the G5 any time soon...both of them run software I've had quite a while, and the cost of upgrading to the Intel cpu versions of everything would exceed what I can afford.