keenmaster486 wrote:Yes! Precisely.
I wish software developers' philosophy would go something like this:
"Develop on a Pentium III and make it do everything you wanted it to do, and fast. Only if there's absolutely no way you can make it work without better hardware do you upgrade your development system. Only after you're done may you load it on your i7-6900K with 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1080 and watch it fly."
Until recently I pretty much used hardware until it died.
When I was 8, we had a Tandy 1000 up until 1992 I believe. We had a 286 as well in 1990, various 386/486 MB's until 1995, Then a Cyrix 5x86 (486) around 1995, Then I acquired a Pentium II in 1999.
That Penitum II was kept until the cpu was switched for a Pentium III due to issues with the MMX triggering BSOD's in Windows XP and later making it unusable. Watch this pattern, it repeats itself. I still have this P3 under my desk as it has a SCSI cd-rom and a 5.25" floppy drive.
So after that I had a P4 laptop and a P4 desktop, I kept the P4 laptop from March 2004 to 2014 when it finally died terribly (the boot screen was just rubbish and wouldn't work even after having the dust blown out.) The P4 desktop was given to my sister to take across the country years ago. It's still in my parents house now. That's the only time I had a name-brand PC, and it was a clearance model.
I built a Xeon system in 2007, literately bought all the parts and then towed it home on the rapid transit and then assembled it, realizing I forgot to buy the OS (Vista at the time.) This system was cursed, with every part being swapped out, MB (P35 to P45 and back to P35), PSU (once), Video card (three times), CPU (2.4Ghz X3220 to C2D 1.6Ghz), RAM (4GB to 4GB of a different brand) , even the OS (to Win7), hard drive, eventually stabilizing on a system that was only about 40% of what I had originally built, but unwilling to sink any more money into it. In 2013 I purchased a i7-4770 and a AsRock Z87 board, and new RAM and finally got rid of the cursed motherboard/cpu/ram. Yet the curse of the Intel multimedia extensions still exist in the Haswell part. Like with the P2, use the wrong multimedia program, instant freeze, except it's the Quicksync feature on of the iGPU. I left it enabled to use it, but after switching to Windows 10, any attempt to use Quicksync locks up the PC hard. I'm seriously considering a Socket 2011 system next time around. No more iGPU parts.
So if you talk about what is the longest you've used something, that would be the laptop (10 years, WinXP) Though it was significantly reduced from main to backup around 2008. Technically the chassis to the PC I'm using right now is the only original part left from the original 2007 or so purchase, though the cursed parts are sitting in another chassis in case I need a backup.
I'd recommend, honestly, if you like to tinker, always have two systems of similar generations. It's much easier to swap parts between systems using the same RAM, the end result of those cursed parts is that I had two of everything, but I had to get the C2D CPU off eBay because by the time I got fed up enough with the X3220 failing, it wasn't possible to buy any new ones.
But if you're developing software, No the baseline should be the weakest system that is commercially produced (that would be the Atom parts) The highest end Pentium III has a single-thread passmark of 427, guess what else is worse? Intel Atom x5-Z8300 (386 passmark) which was released in 2015. The problem is that these low-end parts are poison.
People can not tell the difference between a $200 PC and a $3000 PC the same way people can tell the difference between a $50 handbag and a $3000 LVMH bag. The latter is only about craftsmanship/materials, there is no capability difference. But with a PC the only equivalent to that is the difference between a $1500 PC and a $3000 Mac where the former just used plastic everywhere. Everything between the $200 PC and the $1500 PC is the same to joe-average-consumer. So realisticly someone with a PC from 2007 has the expectation that they can run software released today, becase "aren't all pc's the same?" and then Microsoft comes along to push planned obsolescence by making DirectX9, 10, 11, 12 and so only work on the most recent OS.
So now if you want to keep playing games, you have to buy a new PC every 2 years, even though the PC hardware hasn't changed at all. Meanwhile people who are happy with Office 95/97/2000 have no compelling reason to upgrade their office suite on their Pentium III-era system. You can't tell me there has been any significant developments since adding grammar-checking to Word processors in 1993 (Wordperfect 5.2) Most of the changes to word processors involve document exchange (eg internet email, pdf files, etc), not the actual use of the word processor itself. None of these improvements require a new computer, but the increase in screen real estate, large photos and printers did necessitate having systems that can "do everything" rather than "just one thing."
So the system requirements go up, but fundamentally they haven't changed. A photo in 1993 was a 320x240 or 640x480 image and took maybe 1MB of memory to handle, and might be a black-and-white blob when printed out. In 2016 a standard photo can be 16Megapixels, which means it's 64MB uncompressed in RAM, and needs to be rasterized on the computer before the printer can print it, along with all the other compositing. A Pentium 3 didn't typically have more than 128MB of ram. So you'd never really be able to open and print an image from a digital camera today on a Pentium 3, or at least not without excessive swap thrashing.
