You really may not need to upgrade
By MIKE BERMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
January 15, 2003

According to an informal poll, taken by me on my Web site at (and here comes the shameless plug) www.jocgeek.com, most computer users believe they will benefit from using today's new gigahertz-busting computers.

Thirty-seven percent of visitors to the site who bothered to vote felt that the faster the CPU the better the performance, which couldn't be further from the truth.

These poor, misguided souls are confusing speed with efficiency, a common mistake made by many of us who become caught up in what I've often referred to as computer frenzy. The truth is that, unless you're a hard-core gamer or need to crunch numbers in milliseconds instead of microseconds, you'll hardly notice a difference between these new 3 gigahertz monsters and your old Pentium machine.

You may see programs load and save a mite faster, and you may shave a few seconds off your boot-up time, but that's all, folks. As a pure business application user, you may as well be using a Pentium 300.

Although the folks at AMD and Intel keep telling us that faster is better, and insist that everything will run faster using their new CPUs, a quick reality check shows us that the difference is minimal at best.

So why upgrade?

If you're a technogeek like me, the hunger for the latest and greatest in electronic gadgets is just too strong to resist. You immediately go into "gotta-have-it" mode and shell out the megabucks for that new toy.

Hard-core gamers who need a screaming machine that sends quake testers into speed-demon nirvana tend to drool every time a faster machine hits the market. You know who they are. These are the guys with hard-core rigs with video cards rated higher than the new Corvette for speed and thirst for power when running the new CPU and memory-hungry games.

And finally, we have the number crunchers who thirst for speed in their megadecimal calculations, where faster computers can mean the difference between delivering their reports in seconds instead of minutes.

But others, who don't fit these modes, can be perfectly content with their old clunkers, having confidence that these new machines won't help them spell better or type faster.

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