17th June 2017
While running an IT business for 20 years it has been interesting to see the developments along the way. Back then the Internet was completely in its infancy supplying only basic information and allowing only basic emails to be transmitted. We still used 5.25” floppy disks more than the modern 3.5” floppy disks and hard drives were around the 100Meg mark.
I was at Uni doing Engineering and could not find a suitable computer ‘off the shelf’ so I got a smaller company in Rockhampton to ‘custom build’ a tower PC for me. It turned out to be a good move as it was as reliable as clockwork and I kept it for many years even though I upgraded it nearly every 6 months.
When I finally moved to a new tower the old one had gone from its original to a 5 times larger hard drive, 4 times more ram and it also sported not only a CD-ROM but also a CD-Burner! Times were rapidly changing back then and it never ceased to amaze me that after doing a significant upgrade myself it would turn back on without any smoke.
Move forward 20 years and in the IT world times are still rapidly changing and regardless of the plethora of portable devices and mini PC’s the ‘old school’ desktop tower still has its place. In fact, I got the motivation for this article because of a tower we sold during the last week.
This particular customer had already been using a desktop tower but it had become unreliable. They had over 1TB of their own user data, they ran Reckon Accounting and they wanted to continue to do some photo editing. The only solution was one of our custom built towers.
We put together a PC with the latest Intel i5 CPU, 8GB ram, a 3TB hard drive and a backup system and we put all of this in a mini tower that takes up way less space than the old PC. If the customer gets further into digital photo editing we can add a dedicated video card and more ram then, however for now the new PC will do everything they want and it will do it 10 times faster than their old PC.
There is no doubt that a custom built tower still offers the most flexibility and performance per dollar to the customer than anything else currently in the IT world. If you see a sale advertising an i5 or i7 laptop never believe for one second that it will offer anything like the same performance as the desktop equivalent.
The other interesting points that I come across are people that are holding off on the purchase of a new PC as they are waiting for a new technological breakthrough and those that find an article about and xyz part and want one in their PC. There are technological ‘breakthroughs’ all the time in the IT industry and they usually add another 2 to 5 % performance increase.
If there were to be any ‘huge’ changes we would hear about it for months (like when Windows 10 came out) and it would be more publicised than a little article in a Qantas inflight Magazine.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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