many computer upgrades - unnecessary?

Post Reply New Topic

i honestly think that upgrading computers to make them very powerful is almost always unnecessary and just a bragging right.

- you could be film editor
- you could be an animator/professional musician
- you could want to play games with really high requirements

but most people don't represent the three.

12-16 ram isn't needed. even 8 is a lot. no more than 6 is needed (2-4 is just fine), even if you are a gamer.

terabytes of data are not really needed. you may have 3 tb's of movies, games, music, but likely you only have time to use 20% of them.

It really depends upon what the computer is being used for. A file or backup server could use a couple of terabytes of hard drive space. A system that runs virtual machines with multiple guest operating systems will surely need more that 2 gigabytes of ram if all the operating systems are to run at reasonable speeds. If a specific proprietary program that is bloated with lots of sloppy code is required, then large amounts or ram might be a temporary brute force method of keeping the program from crashing.

For most people, though, I recommend around 4 gigs of ram and 500GB or hard drive space.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody" --Bill Gates
(That's 640K, not 640M, of RAM.)

So if you're saying that there's no way that anyone could ever use a bigger, better, faster computer, then you're wrong. Just like I was wrong when I saw the first 1G hard drive and thought I'd never, ever fill the whole thing up.

That said, from an economic standpoint, you're right. At any given moment there is a high end of computers that are ineffective in terms of bang for the buck, and there is little point in getting one unless you have a specific need. Also, getting an upgrade for an old computer is often quite a bit less effective (in both raw power terms and in terms of bang for the buck) than getting a whole new system.

I also painted flames on my tower, it makes it go faster