{"id":1911,"date":"2010-07-19T00:01:52","date_gmt":"2010-07-19T08:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1911"},"modified":"2010-07-18T21:52:31","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T05:52:31","slug":"when-to-buy-that-new-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1911","title":{"rendered":"When to Buy That New PC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A long time ago, new computers were purchased every two years. Today, it&#8217;s more like six years. Or longer.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI suppose that the reason most folks bought a new PC every other year back in the 1990s was that technology zoomed along that fast.<\/p>\n<p>There was the 486, then the Pentium, the Pentium II, and then Pentium III in just under a half-dozen years or so.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t that people wanted to have the latest and greatest. Nope, it was more like the newer systems were way more faster than the older slugs. Honestly, I remember being blown away at how much faster the Pentium was than the 486 processor. The speed really motivated the upgrade.<\/p>\n<p>Today things aren&#8217;t progressing as fast as they once were.<\/p>\n<p>A recent Wambooli poll showed that most folks have their computers at least 6 years or more. That trend seems to be the norm.<\/p>\n<p>The longest I kept an active, working computer was 10 years. It was my old writing workstation that ran Windows 98. I bought it in 1999 and retired it in 2008. I didn&#8217;t need to retire it, but Word 2007 won&#8217;t run on Windows 98, so I needed a newer system.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, the PC that replaced my older Windows 98 system runs faster. But isn&#8217;t <em>ten years<\/em> too long?<\/p>\n<p>My advice is to consider replacing any computer older than 4 years. That&#8217;s <em>consider<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Four years seems to be the minimum for a desktop system. Especially if you&#8217;re serious about your computer and its data, 4 years is a good time to start thinking about a replacement. At least, start saving up for one: $50 a month will do.<\/p>\n<p>After 4 years, the hard drive might start to go bad. My advice: Backup. All. The. Time.<\/p>\n<p>At around 6 years, seriously start looking toward getting a new PC. If you&#8217;ve saved $50 a month for 24 months (2 years) you&#8217;ll have $1,200 to invest in a new computer. That&#8217;s a good start, especially because you probably won&#8217;t need a new monitor or printer.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll provide some recommendations on computer buying in my next blog post. I have a proven technique for buying the prefect computer just for you. Believe it or not, it&#8217;s just not as easy as going into a big box store and picking up something cheap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A long time ago, new computers were purchased every two years. Today, it&#8217;s more like six years. Or longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1916,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}