I talk about this from time to time. Because of reasons, the thoughts are becoming more frantic. I have a lot of computers, and most of them serve different roles, either around different places in my home, or I use them for different tasks when I'm away from home.
The computer I consider to be my main computer is a Thinkpad T400 that I call superslab. I've written about this system countless times over the years. I got it almost seven years ago in January or February 2009, and have been using it since. When I got it, the idea was that it needed to be upgradeable, flexible, and fast enough to be my only computer. It was my sole endpoint computer for several years, and to this day, is the computer I go to when I am at home and need to do "work" of whatever sort.
It's showing its age, and it's pretty obviously time to think about a replacement, in a few different ways. I have a few problems, namely Windows 10 and an upcoming hardware generation, along with questions about what hardware form factors are most conducive to the things I want to be doing, both on the go and at home.
Of course, the other problem is budgeting. For years upon years, I'd parroted the idea that the way to fund a new computer is just to save a long time for it, but one of the problems with this concept is that putting aside money is hard – probably for everybody. For me, a big problem with it is that it's difficult to put aside money for different things at once. For example, how do you save for both a new computer to replace your laptop, and a bunch of memory for a server?
On one hand, it's a reasonably good achievement, I think. Superslab has far outlived any expectation I originally had for it. Originally I had hoped that it would be productive for a little over three years, which was how much accidental damage protection I bought for it. At that point, the plan had been that I'd be getting a new computer at that point, either a desktop, laptop, or perhaps both, as appropriate.
What actually happened is that I continued using the same computer for a very long time. In 2012, I bought eisbrecher to try to replace it, but I ended up not liking that machine, not needing it, and both getting a Surface RT for on-the-go use and fixing up superslab for at home.
In late 2014, I picked up knarvik and finnmark. Finnmark is a Hyper-V server (now hosting recently virtualized TECT) and knarvik is my Windows 10 Tech Preview desktop.
On the eve of its seventh anniversary, I'm fully aware that I can do more physical maintenance to it and keep using it. That's probably what will happen, if only because the tools that are available for saving money aren't very good.
I'm going to diverge just a little bit from strictly technology issues here: Saving money is hard. There are costs involved in having a separate savings account in a commercial bank, tools like paypal don't have the concept of separate accounts at all. Plus, when it comes to saving money as a young person or as somebody whose work has ever been unstable or as somebody who ever experiences emergencies, it's not uncommon for savings accounts to get completely tapped out when big events come along.
And so, for as much as I like to talk about how the years after the purchase of a new computer should be spent saving for the next really big computer, it just hasn't happened. There's a few different reasons for it. I'm personally prone to emergencies. I have also migrated toward frequently buying "toy" computers such as my Mac mini, the Dell Venue 8 Pro, and less expensive travel computers such as the Surface 3. The other change is in comparison to 2009, I now have a much more urgent need to keep myself equipped with a cell phone of some sort, which usually eats into the computing budget.
In terms of the role that superslab plays specifically, I want to try doing those tasks on the Surface 3, but many of them are actually better suited to a desktop computer, or something much more powerful than the Surface 3. (Especially the parts of it such as managing photos with Lightroom.)
Ultimately, I think part of it is acknowledging that superslab, the ThinkPad T400, has become my proverbial Mac Pro. After the better part of a decade, I can still do (almost?) everything I want on this one laptop computer, and that's both great, because it means I'm not out any functionality, and bad, because it means I really am missing out on legitimate performance improvements. A modern UltraBook class system should be over twice as fast at computing tasks than superslab.
This all comes around to the way I treated computers in my youth. For better or worse, I was always planning on getting more computers, but I was never planning on not using them anymore. It's interesting because there's still no really good reason not to do this. This is even truer now than it was fifteen to twenty years ago. Today, if you pour enough into a computer at the outset, and then maintain it, there's no good reason it won't be relevant in another decade. None of what I do on my ThinkPad couldn't be done on a good desktop from a few years earlier.
The whole thing comes down both to budgeting and to the actual development of a need. The things I have work, and they get security patches, they're maintainable, parts are available, and I have no professional need for more performance on my home computers.
That's actually a big difference from when I bought my current ThinkPad to today. When I first bought the machine, it was under the presumption that I would continue working with photography, imaging, and video at a professional level. Since then, though, I have definitely not done that… at all. Some of the other more compute- and ram-heavy tasks (such as virtualization) have moved onto other boxes, and so it persists as a box for office, media, and the few remaining graphics tasks I have.
The prediction I'd had at the time was that fresh out of the university with a degree in photography I'd be interested in buying a new computer and that I'd be only a generation or two from getting a new camera, which would in turn imply the need for even better computing horsepower. In the years between 2009 and today, the change from high definition to UHD video has also made the need for faster and bigger storage, more RAM, and video has been one of the graphic workflows more impacted by the occurrence of graphics card computing technologies such as OpenCL and CUDA, in addition to normal increases in CPU horsepower, which have seen a few really impressive moves forward with the Sandy Bridge and Haswell generations.
Without that need, the things really driving my computing decisions is the hardware requirements and compatibility for the operating systems I run, and that is going to be the biggest challenge with the ThinkPad T400 moving forward. I am running Windows 8.1 on it today, and getting that running and keeping it going was not nearly as trivial as Windows Vista and 7. I have not yet decided to try Windows 10 on it. That'll probably be something I try on a fresh disk once I get some other maintenance done.
It's probably time to write some more about Windows 10, because I have it on two computers and the experiences have been different, and not exactly completely problem-free on both. Windows 10 might be the thing that forces me to actually retire this ThinkPad.