Well, the previously mentioned system lasted Dad just over 4 1/2 years, so that’s not too bad. The new machine is an Optiplex 755 with a 2.66 GHz Core2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 160GB RAID1 storage (using the Intel chipset RAID), a nice ATI video card and a 19″ Ultrasharp Wide Flat Panel (1908FWP). It’s running Windows XP, but we bought it with a Vista Business license, should he ever need to upgrade.
This one should last just as long or longer than the GX270, I hope.
I find it really interesting that the new machine uses virtually the same clock rate as the previous one. It doesn’t seem like that long ago when it was really hard to convince people that there were other ways to measure and compare PCs than clock rate; now it seems that the whole industry has finally come around.
But, now it’s got 2 processors! And an additional 512MB of RAM (the previous box had to be upgraded to 1.5GB so that SQL Server Express would run locally for some app).