Computer Question

[TCCcaddie]

Funny thing is that I don't have a blank check, all i have is the blank . The purchase wont be until the end of summer after caddying. But I asked the quesiton because if i was going to go the upgrade route then i would want to start buying parts as soon as i had the money, but now that i know im going the desktop route i know that the purchase will be made later around the start of my senior year in high school so i want this comp to last me through college if it can. So thats another reason i want it to be jacked up as much as i can get it. An absolute monster computer now can still be a good computer in 3 or 4 years if taken care of.

[mirv]

i've managed to make several computers last me five years or longer. it's not unreasonable if you keep it in a clean, cool, smoke-free environment and don't clutter the thing up with bullsh*t programs, keep it clean of spyware and viruses, and also allowing that it was a decent quality computer in the first place. i've got an old dell desktop at home that is probably 7 years old by now, and only in the past year has it really noticably dropped off, performance-wise.

[BCEagles722]

But I asked the quesiton because if i was going to go the upgrade route then i would want to start buying parts as soon as i had the money, but now that i know im going the desktop route i know that the purchase will be made later around the start of my senior year in high school so i want this comp to last me through college if it can..

Trust me, you're going to want a laptop in college. So unless you plan on getting a laptop to go along with your desktop before you go to college, you might want to reconsider...

[zeg]

I did not know that. Seems weird...or inefficient anyway. .WAV has higher quality I guess.

(off-topic) WAV is raw, uncompressed audio, bit-for-bit identical to what came from the sound card, so it is what you want to use for editing (although you could losslessly compress it). MP3/OGG are lossy compression, so while they might be ok for listening, they're not even remotely appropriate for mixing/recompressing.

(on-topic) I think you'll be hard pressed to get a laptop to last more than ~3 years unless you baby it. That's just because of the inevitable physical wear and tear. In terms of processing power, I don't think 5 years is a ridiculous target any more unless you're really bent on playing 3D games at super-high frame rates. My laptop is now 3 years old and keeps up quite well, although I don't game at all (and its graphics always stunk). I don't see any reason you can't get 5 years out of a desktop. Of course, my OS of choice is Linux, which generally works much better with slower hard ware. If you're going to run the Windows flavor of the month, you may find you need more frequent upgrades. It's been long enough since I've done that (outside of VMWare) that I don't really know (thank goodness!) For your needs, though, I would not advise Linux, mostly because of the games and music recording. The latter can actually be done remarkably well, but it's going to take some technical work to get it going...