is it still benficical to upgrade?

[Rudyard]

I read a comment (maybe in this forum) that intel (and microsfot?) have ensured that it is no longer beneficial to upgrade and you basically just buy a new PC these days.

I remember back in the 386 and 486 days that I used to upgrade all the time and it was cheaper than buying new.

What has changed and why is it no longer good to upgrade?

If I wanted to upgrade to a quad core in a year or 2 I was planning to just change the MB and Processor, why is that not a good option?

[DarrellS]

Nothing new supports old technology.

You only get one IDE connector so you're limited to two IDE devices. Everything else will have to be SATA. Old memory won't work on new boards. AGP video cards won't work since new boards use PCI-e. Oh, and in a year or two, Quad Cores will be old techology and the new CPUs won't work on these boards.

[jameshgross]

Now a days you just cannt build a PC as cheap as the big integrators can.

[Ethlred]

What you get from building your own is a PC that meets your need and not a manufacturers bottom line focus. You can use a BIG case for lots of hard drives for instance. A big power supply to support them and that over the top video card you have been drooling over.

Do those things to a Dell or HP with a power supply designed to cut pennies and you will burn it up. You will get a copy of Vista thats locked to the manufacturer and a hard drive filled with unwanted software that MAY actually be useful for someone but not you despite its running in the background all the time. You'll get a copy of last years Norton not this years that actually works. Worse you could get a copy of McAfee that won't come out without major digital surgery if you let it stay just to see if you can tolerate it.

Upgrading a PC is getting an extra hard drive. Replacing the video card that is now obsolete because you bought John Carmac's latest GPU crusher and MUST have 120 frames a second because your neighbor keeps fragging you. Its not really getting a new cpu unless you bought a cheap one to tide you over. Serious upgrades have ALWAYS needed a new motherboard and memory and video. Well at least for me it has. Its different for people that do it every year.

I do still have my case and floppy drive from six years ago. I think some of the screws might be original too.

[wtsinnc]

My Dell PC bought November of 2005 is now so outdated that as far as upgrading, practically anywhere would be a good place to start. I've researched upgrades for cpu, cpu/motherboard (Dell proprietary), memory, power supply, and video card and it just doesn't make sense to put the cash into such a project. What I paid $1000.00 for about thirty months ago can now be exceeded for roughly half as much. Building my own computer carries with it the possibility of mismatching parts somewhere along the line plus no overall full system warranty, only the warranties for those individual components which may or may not be honored depending on the reason for a failure. Finally, you have to decide just how important cutting edge (or near it) is to you. Obviously, I am not a gamer so what I own serves me fairly well. When the need arises to replace my current system, I will probably get another Dell (small business) and take advantage of the three year on-site warranty. I have already purchased OEM copies of XP Pro and XP Home for future use and there continues to be plenty of good free software to choose from. As of now, software is the only sensible way to upgrade my computer.

[jman98]

Like wtsinnc, my most recent PC purchase was in 2005. I have an older PC that I built almost 8 years ago that still works, so I have both built and bought. In my opinion it's not really cheaper to build it yourself, but you do have control over the components. I built at the time because I had very specific requirements and I had to build to get what I wanted. I bought 3 years ago because an off the shelf HP PC I found at BestBuy had everything I wanted and I couldn't build it myself cheaper. BestBuy also had some nice financing at the time.

PCs have changed drastically in the past few years. PCI has been replaced with PCI Express. SATA now replaces IDE. Because of these kinds of changes, unless you happen to have a bunch of SATA devices and a PCI Express video card already, you might as well just buy a new PC as to upgrade and replace everything anyway. Or build your own PC if you prefer over buying.

Of course Intel wants you to buy new equipment, but there are some advantages to the new SATA and PCI Express technologies. Microsoft does not per se require you to upgrade (XP required no significant upgrades over 2000 except maybe for memory), but they are so incompetent that they wrote Vista where basically you have to have the latest and greatest hardware to run it. There are alternatives- you don't HAVE to run Vista.
You can run Linux and you can still get XP.