Robert; I did not intend upgrade path to mean just more memory or a larger hard drive with new cards. I meant change the mother boards from 8088 to 80286 to 80386 to 80486 to Pentium to pentium pro.
This entire path is available to the ISA(industry standard architecture.
As you go up and cards get better and change to PCI etc you must also change them as well. And the switch from DIP to SIMM to DIMM meant you must discard RAM(unless you bought one of the hybrid adapters for SIMM to DIMM)
In addition the old 40 meg hard drives for the legacy 286/386 systems are sort of toast now.
But the idea is quite valid as you can do creeping incremental upgrades, increase the CPU speed as the fast ones get cheaper, same mother board.
Of course the saving if you use only the case, power supply, keyboard and mouse and replace all the rest is only $125 or so, so it does not pay for a total replacement.
However millions of Wintel systems have been upgraded this way and it is very popular now, I do it myself even though I could afford to buy anything I wanted my sense of otrage prevent me from wasting money. I upgrade every 4-6 months with new MB/CPU migration, extra RAM, CD writer etc. Items that are not industry standard like Dell, Zenith, Compaq, AST etc cannot be upgraded this way(unless you get their big bucks proprietary upgrade)
Do you remember when you upgraded cars?, I can recall putting a V-8 into a 1951 Pontiac, what an axle breaker I made, went through 6 axles in 6 months street dragging(clutches and speeding tickets too)
They do not do that now. If the dells have their way we will lose ISA for the PC market, but I feel not, as the standard is well entrenched now, and make be unshakeable.
By the way have you seen the major blunder just made by Intel?? They have gone to a proprietary socket with fast cache RAM, that they have patented to keep AMD off their backs. But the AMD K6 is faster better and uses the old standard sockey. Looks like the microchannel war that IBM lost. Will Intel win>>, or surrender and make processors for both, or be forced by AMD to cut the price to the point where the new socket is the same price as the K6, thus throwing it away to keep AMD at bay?? If AMD can get foundry space to make enough K6s they could kick Intass this year and next, and make Intek take a big bottom line profit hit as the price of keeping AMD under control. They have to cut their price by $100 to make AMD lose $5 as they have about 20 times the volume of AMD.
News at 11
Bill |
