Iria

It used to be that every three years, workers would get brand new computers from their businesses’ tech departments. But for many those days are over.
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Source: WSJ

Customgamer1

Well I can see why without even opening the source lol.

In the 90's and such computers were more or less very slow and with the parts not really lasting that long like the hard drive and whatever it was common to get an upgrade.

Now in 2008 a dual core cpu with 2gigs of ram and a 120gig hard drive should last the worker a heck of a lot longer without it being really slow to just use word, internet and whatever the other lower power program the company uses.

No longer makes sense to upgrade them every 3 years. Maybe 5-6 years is my guess.

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Asus Laptop: 2.5 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gigs DDR 2, Windows 7 64bit! Windows 7 > OSX!

swimtech

A year and a half ago...

I speced units with E6420 processors, 2Gigs PC2 667 Ram, NVid 7600GT graphics, 160G 7200rpm drives, DVD burners, and every i/o you can think of except SCSI (USB, Firewire, ESata, DVI and VGA, card readers, 5.1 audio, RJ-45, serial, and parallel ports). 22" monitors too. With a ram upgrade, these should/could last fine for 4 more years likely - for 5 1/2 years total. This past year saw a relatively large percentage of computers of the P4 2.6-3/0Ghz, DDR, IDE machines replaced - thank God. This year forward (and next, no doubt) money will be very tight for machine replacements.

Units today have similar technology, with stronger (2.66 3m cache/3.00 6m cache) Core2 processors and high efficiency PSUs - without all the extra I/O I needed - for less than $1K US.

We're shooting for a 4 year refresh cycle, but machines like this will give us leeway with apps/os/networking and other technology changes without leaving user's work and productivity levels dragging in the mud - hopefully. You never really know until you get well down the road. But this is looking pretty good... We are very conscious that we are people - serving people (NO - ideologically speaking - we do not service the computer - it's the person!) - that need to get stuff done using their computers!

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It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.

Judas

my work computers range from brand new to really old...

i shift from one to the other depending on when they sell...

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Tril

I guess it depends what the computers are used for. For general office work, a few years is fine.

It's different with some specific areas. At my local university, there are people running aeroelastic and aerodynamic simulations with wind turbine blades. The simulations can easily take more than one week to complete on a recent computer. When doing work like that, you need the fastest processing time you can get and you'll upgrade more often.

ET3D

My work computer is a little newer than my home computer. Same Athlon X2 3800+ but AM2 instead of 939. More disk space but slightly less RAM. Same graphics card.

swimtech

Right - just read recently too, that GPU acceleration for these type tasks should be forthcoming shortly in the driversets for existing GPUs beginning this year, and develop more fully as time passes. That will hopefully bring a nice boost - also for Adobe apps in media production. That's a case where a technology integration can help to take the place of a pricey upgrade, if the proper hardware is already in place.

Here's hoping too that Win7 will cut some overhead (and time...) as compared to Vista, and be faster than XP 32bit. We skipped Vista at work...

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It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.