Goodbye Old Friend

It’s time to say goodbye to an old friend. I purchased my ASUS i7-7th Gen desktop for $800 in July 2017. At the time it was cutting edge with a new processor, a 2TB hard drive, and 16GB of RAM. Over the past seven years I’ve pushed it to, and sometimes beyond its limit though it never faltered. Ripping & burning CD’s, editing and rendering videos and DVDs, managing 100MB Word files, Photoshop graphic creations & editing, and so much more. At least 18,000 hours of screen-on time – more than 5,000 hours with the CPU near the breaking point. The machine was never turned off, except for reboots. So, that equates to more than 2,500 days of uptime. Kudos to Toshiba for their amazingly responsive hard drive. It’s the longest any drive has ever lasted for me.

But recently the old girl has been showing her age. I’d say about 84 in computer years (1/12). This Intel processor just missed the cut for a Windows 11 upgrade. And that hard drive – I knew it couldn’t last much longer. Sure, I could replace the drive for $50 and spend several days setting everything up again, but I’d still have an old, slower, non-upgradable machine with other components near their end-of-life. The boiling point came last week when Microsoft pushed out their monthly update on July 9th. My supercharged office machine (more on that later) completed the update in three minutes. When I got home that afternoon, I knew old Betsy would be wanting to update as well. So, I clicked ok and waited… and waited… and waited. A full 45 minutes before the welcome screen was displayed… for a simple security update. Then another 15 minutes with the disk running at 100%, preventing me from opening anything until it was done with whatever it was doing – something that’s been happening every time I needed to reboot. It was time for a change

I upgraded my office desktop to an ASUS ProArt PD500 i7 – 11th Gen last January. It’s got 32GB of RAM and an NVIDIA video card that can handle up to four monitors (I only have room for two). A high-performance gaming computer made to look like an office machine, though it does have some cool lighting on the front display. It’s been a dream using it the past eighteen months. Incredibly fast and powerful. I knew that nothing else would suffice for my home replacement.

PC prices have been all over the place the past six years with COVID creating a huge demand and then due to over-production, prices dropping down below pre-COVID, then back up when things were again in short supply. My office machine was $1,300 last year, and a recent check revealed the current price for the same model had jumped to $2,000. Yikes! ASUS now makes several variations of the ProArt, each with minor differences that impact the price. After some searching, I found a ProArt i7 – 13th Gen machine with a NVIDIA GeForce 4060 video card w/8GB of memory, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD (Solid-State Drive) for $1,500. Sold. From 4 cores to 16 in a snap. Oh, and a three-year warranty. Thank you ASUS. The day it arrived, I added a nearly-new 1TB Seagate hard drive for 2TB of storage total. Now I have an internal backup drive to compliment my external backup drive, along with OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive in the Cloud. You can never have too many backups.

The price of a ProArt will scare some, but considering a seven-year life expectancy for a machine you’ll likely use every day, that’s 59 cents per day for more power than you’ll ever need to handle anything you throw at it. Performance to the max. It’s more funner. What can you get for 59 cents these days? For me, peace of mind. I’m a 66% guy. Like a car’s speedometer that goes up to 140mph. You may never push it beyond 90, though it’s nice to know there’s more juice under the hood… or in the box for that special occasion. Scotty, we need more power! If you’re a power user, or you like mixing some gaming with work, or you’re simply tired of waiting… and waiting check out the ASUS ProArt series of workstations. It won’t disappoint. Of that, I’m certain. Oh, I did check my lottery tickets before ordering. That ProArt i9 with 64GB of RAM for $3,300 looked awful tempting.

Happy computing.