Are PCs past their prime?

[amirm]

From technology point of view, the PC hardware is in the best place it has ever been. The race to boost clock speed and with it, power consumption has subsided with today's PCs being cool and powerful. This is important for those of us using the PC as A/V sources but even for every day work, it is nice to have a quiet PC. My new workstation uses SSD instead of hard disk for its boot drive and it is essentially silent compared to my old workstation which was built 4 years ago and sounded like a tornado.

Yet, it seems the PC may never get the luster it once had with portable computing products getting faster, bigger and more functional. While work computers are safe, the PC in the home is starting to get get threatened. And at any rate, are not considered "cool" anymore: http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2011/01/why_pcs_get_no_respect.php

What do you think? If we fast forward 5 to 10 years from now, will we have more tables and phones for our everyday computer or will notebooks and desktops be still dominant in the home?

 

[Steve williams]

well for sure it will be different but hopefully there will be a better product than Windows to go with it.

FWIW I have 2 side by side laptops, one a brand new Sony Vaio running Windows 7 and an Apple Mac Book Pro running an older version of OS10

They were both open yesterday and I was going out so I powered them down simultaneously. The Mac was off in under 5 seconds whereas the Sony Vaio running Windows took almost 3 minutes to power off

 

[amirm]

Let me say that when I said "PC" I meant all "Personal Computers" and not just Windows PCs . The PC Mag article is just as down on Apple's promotion of PCs as it is WinTel.

As to Sony, they install incredible amount of crapware on their PCs which can destabilize the PC and cause other grief. That said, we have two and they both go to sleep lightning fast -- 2 seconds or so if I don't have a ton of apps running. If a lot more, maybe 3-4 seconds.

Be sure to check the default though. If it is set to hibernate instead of sleep, you have to wait for it to write the entire RAM to hard disk which can take time. Set it "suspend" instead.

 

[Steve williams]

I have no apps running and also deleted all the crap from the Sony when I bought it. I do agree though that it was sure odd to watch the different power off times

 

[JackD201]

I've lived the last decade on nothing but laptops. Funny thing is now that I moved from a condo to a house, I found I needed a place to keep everything in order, a server. I firmly believe however that market share for domestic desktops will continue to drop as usage has shifted to web and mail applications, which are becoming achievable on many platforms from phones to tablets, to TVs to Gaming Consoles.

 

[amirm]

Oh, I just realized you were asking for power off. I never power off my PCs. I always let them suspend. That way on and off is very quick. True shutdown can be longer although my desktop system running Windows 7 shuts down in 4-5 seconds (never timed the laptop as I never shut it down).

 

[Ron Party]

4-5 seconds for complete shut down? Amir, please start a thread about powering off PCs.

 

[amirm]

OK, that was a bit of a fish story . I just timed it and it was 9 to 10 seconds.

The trick is pretty simple. Make sure your boot drive is an SSD. That will give a tremendous boost to many of your activities, including booting and shutting down. Watch your disk light go crazy as you perform these activities. My boot time is 30 seconds and that includes a lengthy BIOS start up message before Windows starts.

See this thread on SSDs: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...rives-and-How-Memory-is-Used-in-your-Computer

 

[Steve williams]

I am not so sure that it is in the consumers best interest to buy a SSD to shorten their power off time.

 

[Old Listener]

> Are PCs past their prime?

PCs are a mature product. I haven't seen any compelling new applications in several years. PCs have been fast enough for most mainstream uses for some years too.

> it seems the PC may never get the luster it once had with portable computing products getting faster,
> bigger and more functional.

CES and tech journalism focus on new products and opportunities. Intel will sell a lot of Sandy Bridge chips this year and Microsoft will sell Win 7 by the boatload.

Does everybody need a complicated, general purpose device like a PC for personal use? No.

There is an obvious logic to offering an alternative to PCs that is simpler to use and is dedicated to one or a few functions. Companies have been trying to sell such products for many years without much success. It appears that the time is finally right.

Bill

 

[Jay_S]

I find that Windows 7 power off times are relatively quick unless there is a system update. Then it can take 1 - 3 minutes. Unfortunately, Microsoft releases weekly updates so if you are turning off your laptop, as opposed to putting it to sleep, you occasionally have to wait for the update to complete. And often the update will continue once you turn your computer back on. I keep everything in sleep mode unless I am traveling. Going back and forth to sleep mode, Windows 7 is pretty close in speed to OS X.

 

[amirm]

I am not so sure that it is in the consumers best interest to buy a SSD to shorten their power off time.

Steve, read my comment as if I said "Brembo brakes look awesome too!" The fact that SSDs let your system booth and shut down extremely fast is the icing on the cake. An SSD makes your everyday tasks go so much faster. Nothing cripples a moder CPU running at 3 billion operations a second when a hard disk can only do 100! A four year old PC with SSD will run faster than a brand new one without! Unless you are pinching pennies, you really owe it to yourself to replace your hard disk with a solid state disk. I can give you a thousand pieces of computer advice that would not add up to the pleasure and usefulness that this upgrade brings.

When I post the information in the post on SSDs on another forum, this was one of the replies I received:

"First off, this thread motivated me to go out and purchase an SSD which I had previously not done due to mixed opinions and reviews that seemed to indicate a slight performance boost depending on the task, but with an obvious loss in storage space. I don't know what the tech writers I read are smoking, maybe all they ever run and test with is gmail, because the performance increase I have experienced is nothing short of astounding.

I just extracted a very large multi-GB iso file I had created that probably took 15 minutes in the past on this same computer, in 53 seconds. Opening most programs is now almost like flipping a light switch, I can only barely detect the time between clicking and seeing the program launch. A few programs that load with a ton of stuff and are communicating with servers take 3 seconds or so, but the delay is obviously because they are waiting for info from the server.

Programs that would normally throw up the hour glass and be unusable until the hourglass disappeared, now while the hourglass is up if I click on something else in the (same) program, instead of getting a "not responding" message as is common in Win 7, the command I clicked on is buffered in memory and as soon as the hourglass disappears the command is activated."

 

[Jay_S]

The trick is pretty simple. Make sure your boot drive is an SSD. That will give a tremendous boost to many of your activities, including booting and shutting down. Watch your disk light go crazy as you perform these activities. My boot time is 30 seconds and that includes a lengthy BIOS start up message before Windows starts.

See this thread on SSDs: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...rives-and-How-Memory-is-Used-in-your-Computer

This is very persuasive. Do you have any specific recommendations on SSD drives for a laptop? Is anything better going to be coming out in the next quarter?

 

[amirm]

SSDs keep getting better although they are pretty good now. The field is unfortunately quite complex with different trade offs regarding longevity and performance. There is a rat race to see who can get ahead and folks are starting to cheat.

That said, I just researched the 256 Gigabyte units and put in an order for Crucial C300 SSD. Both newegg and Amazon sell it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0039SM0B2/ref=oss_product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...8363&cm_re=SSD_crucial-_-20-148-363-_-Product

I am replacing my 500 gig hard disk in my Vaio laptop that is starting to fail. It should be here tomorrow. I will post my experience once I install it.

Of course, there are less pricey units at lower capacity. My current laptop with everything on it is using 87 Gigabytes so a 128 Gigabyte unit would have worked also except that I store images on my computer when I go on a photo shoot so I am making sure there is enough space there.

FYI the performance of the above unit has already exceeded that of standard Sata interface at 3 gigabits/sec! So for laptops, I am not sure you need anything much better.

Note that above SSD is for 2.5 inch hard disks. Go to device manager and look up the model number of the current hard disk you have. Google and see what the dimensions are. It might be 1.8" instead of 2.5.

 

[FrantzM]

HI
Once you go SSD, there is no going back .. I am amusing myself with a Pentium III PC and only now do I rember the importance of fast I/O in a disk system.. Because the old machine is zipping through ZP like a modern day dual core (will be used or a storage media server) ... Eerything works faste, not subjectively one can measure it if one would care to ...

I remember however that SSD have a limit on how many Read and Write they can perform before dying ... It has been getting higher but I don't remmember exactly how many ... How does that translate in paractical term I don't know .. Any info?

 

[amirm]

New SSD controllers have sophisticated "wear leveling" systems where they shuffle blocks to avoid overwriting them too much. As such, it is advisable to get a larger SSD than you need as to leave some extra space for that use.

Note that the limitation is not reading but writing. On a desktop system I always pair the SSD with a real hard disk and put my write intensive data on the hard disk (things you rewrite all the time). The thread I linked to has that detail.

My sense is that a modern SSD will outlive a typical laptop which sadly, doesn't have a long life due to severe conditions in which it lives.

 

[Mark (Basspig) Weiss]

SSD tech looks exciting, because of the faster boot and shutdown times. But I would only use it for the boot drive for now. I need multi-terrabyte drives in RAID0 for editing uncompressed HD video.

I had bad things happen nearly every time I shut down a PC for a day or more. RAM problems, sound card failures, system crashes shortly after starting up, HD failures, BIOS errors, etc. So I am a proponent of leaving it on 24/7. Systems seem stable when I leave them powered on.

The big challenge is, unlike my early PCs in the 1980s, today's PCs use energy like a toaster oven. A Kill-A-Watt P3 revealed that each of my editing PCs uses about 530W at idle, 718W when running Prime95 Torture test, and only drops to about 410W in standby mode. My 3kVA UPS is maxed out when the two editing PCs are working and my small web server is idling (it uses about 65W). I've got 6 HDs in the editing stations, and four big external drives, for a total of ten drives per PC. The nVidia graphics card uses as much power by itself as the average PC. The PCs cost about $40-50/month each to operate. They do heat my 1,000 sq ft studio/theater nicely, even in -15°F cold that we're having.. only problem is $500~ monthly electric bills.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I will soon need to move to 12 cores and 32GB RAM for the newest Adobe editing software to run at a responsive enough pace under Win 7/64-bit. The newest nVidia 3D accelerator itself using almost 240W of power, coupled with a large array of super-fast RAID drives and two 6-core CPUs only suggests that my energy usage is going to go up, when or if I can one day afford the $10,000 per PC upgrade of hardware and software. Where does it end? (I know, actually, but let's not go there!)

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I think were very quickly evolving toward a point where most will have a central computer/server hooked to the internet at one end and a wireless router at the other, and that very few people will sit down in front of that computer to do much of anything. Instead, it will connect the home to the outside and the people will connect to it (from home and beyond) with their personal devices - phones, pads, whatever comes next.

Is that the end of the PC or just an evolution of its user interface? If the home computer is on its way out, it will be driven into a cloud, not replaced by a pad.

Tim

 

[JackD201]

You mean like wireless dumb terminals Tim?

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

You mean like wireless dumb terminals Tim?

No, I was thinking of a full-blown PC, a server, with BIIIIG hard drives, holding the media, and portable devices accessing it. This is, of course, happening now with those who are into such things. Frankly, I don't think it's going to last long as I expect it to be replaced by clouds filled with software, media and files for portable devices to access as needed. Then all the home will need is a wireless router, and the biggest device in the user's hands will be something like a Mac Air (and it might get dumber...not need to hold software, etc). Some of us will still need keyboards so we can type long posts into message boards . I think all the objections aimed at portable devices for their lack of ports, hard drives, etc, are going to look as silly in a few years as a computer with a floppy disc.

Tim