this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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I have been an IT professional since 1995. Never have I ever had a personal PC that wasn't either a refurbished laptop or some sort of Frankenstein abomination that I put together from whatever was on sale and upcycled parts.
I've been in the game for about the same amount of time. I stopped doing that about 15 years ago when I saw that the electricity I was paying on older gear was equaling or exceeding the cost of buying newer, faster, and lower power consumption hardware.
Power costs is a poor tax in the same way skipping the dentist and getting a root canal later is.
Also in the process of power efficiency-izing my lab. It just wasn't a feasible option before, I didn't have the means. I just paid interest via electricity.
Do we need to update Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness to Sam Vimes **‘Compute’ ** Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness?
Curiously, judging by my recent upgrade parts search, the peak of the capability-to-power-used curve on PCs (at least gaming ones) seems to have peaked about a decade ago.
Signed, a fellow Old Sea Dog Of Tech who has also gone through the same change over a decade ago
I swear it folk have the shittest hardware and jankiest setups and create more problems for themselves than any user ever could.
It’s why we’re able to fix all the things. We dogfood shit setups, unsupported configurations, and weird edge cases so you don’t have to.
I don't even restart when installing new software that needs it, I just reload whatever service or dependent software on the fly 😎
It is impossible to pull any enthusiast away from their 7-row Thinkpad
The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like "least maintenance time required" or "maximum computing power lowest energy consumption" (or it's companion "silent yet powerful").
Maybe "I'm fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side" is the real mid-life crisis of techies.
I try do everything with 2nd hand stuff as cheap as possible. This causes me and unbelievable amount of trouble because I have to try get all this ancient shit to work in a spaghetti network. half the time I don't even know what I'm doing I'm just happy to be there.
Yeah, I've been there - it's how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn't just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).
I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.
Anyways, I still keep the "no waste" habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn't want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).
Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is "lower TDP") and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.
Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).
Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it's normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don't really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It's worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).