Talking About Home Technology: Buying or Upgrading
| This entry is part of the Talking About Home Technology series. You can find explanations of the boldface words there.
This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry is spoken, so that you can listen to it while you read. (MP3) |
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There are a lot of arguments, I think, against buying a new computer. That is, if you have a computer and you’re what I’d call a “normal home user,” I don’t think you need to worry about a new computer. I would encourage my parents, I would encourage my friends to—instead of buying a new computer—to upgrade the old computer. “Upgrade means simply to take the old computer and make it better.
You can upgrade the RAM, or memory, in the your computer. . .and I think the RAM, in my experience, is the single most important factor in making the computer work more quickly. You can upgrade the hard drive space. This is pretty easily done. Either you buy a second hard drive or an external hard drive.
And. . . I myself don’t like the idea of upgrading RAM alone because of compatibility issues. You need to make sure that the RAM you buy is compatible with both your motherboard and the RAM you already have. Buying a hard drive, however, only means making sure you have room for an extra hard drive in your computer and adding an extra hard drive.
That said. . . I didn’t upgrade my computer, I bought a new computer. Part of the reason is. . . Simple: I’m a little boy. When it comes to buying new electronics, I want to buy new. I shouldn’t, but I am a child.
But, I have other reasons. First, recently I’ve started encoding MP3s for Bite-Sized-English.com and encoding MP3s was a pretty difficult job for my old computer. It took quite a while. Second, we’re going to have a child. And one of the things I wanted before the child came, was a good system for backing up our photos
Now, without a child, we have sixty-four gigabytes of photos. That’s my wife’s old photos from before we met, my old photos from before we met. And the photos we’ve taken together since we’ve met. Sixty-four gigabytes of photos. That’s insane. My first hard drive didn’t even have one gigabyte on it, but maybe I’m old.
Anyhow, my old computer didn’t have room for all 64 GB and we bought an external hard drive. That’s fine, but, in the event of a hard drive crash. . . A “hard drive crash” is when a hard drive stops working. When a computer part stops working we say it ‘crashes,’ like a car crashes. Anyhow, if there was a hard drive crash, I was worried my photos would all be gone, forever. That would be bad today, but it would be even worse if a whole year or two years of baby photos were on the hard drive.
So, what I rationalized was: I could buy a new computer with a lot more hard drive space. My computer has a terabyte of storage. The new computer, I mean, has a terabyte of storage. A thousand gigabytes. I hope we never get it filled. Anyhow, I could buy a new computer with more storage and use the external hard drive I bought before to back up the photos. That way we’d have two copies and we would never lose tho photos we’ve taken. I hope.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed, but. . . that was my logic in buying a new computer.
Here’s my question for you: would you rather buy new, or upgrade your old computer? Do you think it’s important to have the newest electronic devices? Do you think people who have to have the newest devices are a little bit crazy? If you’re a gadget person, it’s a pretty expensive hobby. And, if you are a gadget person, I’d be interested to hear how you explain spending so much money on gadgets.
