10 year old desktop for me upgraded with an SSD drive
Good for you! I wish more people would upgrade their gear.
Me to Fire. Fortunately being in the IT business and having early access to the new Solid State Drive (SSD) technology I quickly realised what a game changer the new SSD drives were for older computers. We were all set to dump 5000 desktop computers in schools and replace them with new ( I worked for an education authority) as we had to move to the new Windows 10 O/S . when we tested SSD drives in these older computers we quickly realised that we no longer needed to do that , but simply update to SSD drives as the increase in boot, read write speeds was amazing with these new drives it effectively created a new computer using old hardware. As long as the PC had a decent processor it was like buying a new machine. So of course I applied the same process to my 10 year old beast and it just flies along now.
I would urge anyone using an older computer with an older SATA drive to simply replace it with an SSD drive. SSD drives can be had from £50 depending on size of drive.
'The power of accurate observation .... is commonly called cynicism by those that have not got it.
From the results so far of the poll, it seems to be a pretty even spread of device types, which I find interesting. I'm on a light, solid drive laptop, which makes online life easy. Perhaps too easy.
9" iPad on the sofa and iMac desktop when I'm in the study. Find reading and writing with both very easy - although writing and editing is easiest on a desktop full size keyboard.
If I'm hanging about waiting somewhere I do use my phone - but it's nowhere near as easy to navigate the site or type a post.
Re SATAs and SSDs: We spent part of lockdown upgrading our computers last year. OH has a 2012 Macbook Pro which had a 750Gb SATA hard drive which was more than full (we'd had to use additional external storage) and was running really slowly despite trying lots of tweaks and clean ups. We were thinking about buying a new laptop for him.
After a lot of YouTubing he removed the DVD drive and the hard drive and replaced those with 2 SSDs. He now has a more stable, really fast machine with 1.5TB of storage (more than enough) for less than £200. Considerably cheaper and greener than a new machine🙂
Heaven is ... sitting in the garden with a G&T and a cat while watching the sun go down
There is a move to make smart phones more fixable and updatable. I have an eight year old Macbook and will do what I can to upgrade it when it needs it - but now it's pretty much as good as new. Pretty impressive, I think, given how much I use it, though I rarely use it for graphics, music making or film editing. I imagine that would get harder on an older machine over time as files get larger.
Yes @Fire. OH uses his Macbook very heavily for film and photo editing and (particularly movie editing) requires a lot of storage for original files, processing files and the final cut. Obviously once he's happy with the final result he gets rid of the original and processing files, but there's a point when he's getting towards the end of an edit when he's using mega storage. Even now, if he's editing a lot of movie footage he might still need to use an external SSD for the processing files.
Heaven is ... sitting in the garden with a G&T and a cat while watching the sun go down
I have done some movie editing, composing and graphics work on mine but my laptop is not really powerful enough to do it. Things get very slow and I am no aficionado and no doubt there would be easier way of doing things. But I didn't really chose the Macbook for that. I'm still impressed with Macs.
From the 50 responses in the poll (a good sample), there is an interesting and wide spread of tech used - seven viewing via a phone.
I think we (I) tend to underestimate how the tech chosen to engage with groups, discussion and conversation, affects what we can actually see and how we participate. Things like adblockers, browser choice, screen size, data allowances and internet speeds (particularly for images) make a great deal of difference in how the site and group seem to us.
Plus there may be countries where the forum maybe blocked from viewing entirely.
Posts
Me to Fire. Fortunately being in the IT business and having early access to the new Solid State Drive (SSD) technology I quickly realised what a game changer the new SSD drives were for older computers.
We were all set to dump 5000 desktop computers in schools and replace them with new ( I worked for an education authority) as we had to move to the new Windows 10 O/S . when we tested SSD drives in these older computers we quickly realised that we no longer needed to do that , but simply update to SSD drives as the increase in boot, read write speeds was amazing with these new drives it effectively created a new computer using old hardware. As long as the PC had a decent processor it was like buying a new machine.
So of course I applied the same process to my 10 year old beast and it just flies along now.
I would urge anyone using an older computer with an older SATA drive to simply replace it with an SSD drive. SSD drives can be had from £50 depending on size of drive.
'The power of accurate observation .... is commonly called cynicism by those that have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw'
9" iPad on the sofa and iMac desktop when I'm in the study. Find reading and writing with both very easy - although writing and editing is easiest on a desktop full size keyboard.
If I'm hanging about waiting somewhere I do use my phone - but it's nowhere near as easy to navigate the site or type a post.
Re SATAs and SSDs: We spent part of lockdown upgrading our computers last year. OH has a 2012 Macbook Pro which had a 750Gb SATA hard drive which was more than full (we'd had to use additional external storage) and was running really slowly despite trying lots of tweaks and clean ups. We were thinking about buying a new laptop for him.
After a lot of YouTubing he removed the DVD drive and the hard drive and replaced those with 2 SSDs. He now has a more stable, really fast machine with 1.5TB of storage (more than enough) for less than £200. Considerably cheaper and greener than a new machine🙂
Obviously once he's happy with the final result he gets rid of the original and processing files, but there's a point when he's getting towards the end of an edit when he's using mega storage. Even now, if he's editing a lot of movie footage he might still need to use an external SSD for the processing files.