E-Business
Issue No. 3 - December/ 2001/january
Upgrade or not?
by David Twiss
Some might says it’s a funny thing the way we upgrade computer operating systems and computers themselves when they’re not broken. In many walks of life we buy a piece of equipment to do a job, and while it still does that job effectively we keep it. In a machine shop they don’t replace a machine just because a newer model is released; and yet with desktop computers we have been conditioned to follow a continuous upgrade cycle.
It fascinates me to observe that in larger enterprises the corporate applications like financials, HR, payroll and the like are often being run quite successfully on machines that have been in place for some years. I bet my new desktop is faster than many of those machines, but is that any reason to replace them?
I consider myself a ‘power user’ of Microsoft Office, and I reckon Office 95 was quite a watershed. Lots of people would reflect that it might have shipped somewhat raw, but it delivered a watershed of new capability all the same. Subsequent releases have been less buggy, or so it seems, and have included more glitzy features than I can remember. But I’m not sure how many of those new features I couldn’t live without.Every now and then I stumble across some new feature in Word or Excel: it seems to me there are at least three ways to do any operation in Word or Excel — if only I could remember them all!
In my office we’ve just migrated our desktop PCs to Windows 2000 and Office 2000, and now Office XP and Windows XP are on the street. Listening to the hype makes me really appreciate Microsoft’s marketing prowess. Here is a company that has been highly successful bringing cool stuff to market and convincing most of us we can’t live without it.
We initially ran Windows 2000 on our 3—year—old PCs (PII – 266 64MB) but after a while it all seemed a bit slow. Inevitably we replaced our 3—4 year old desktop PCs with new ones from Dell. The new PCs are quick, quiet, small and look sma...
