h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was browsing some electrical goods shops the other day and noticed there were few, if any desktop PCs on sale. PC World had one solitary, sparsely populated aisle with 1 higher end gaming PC, 1 middle of the road touchscreen PC and 3 or 4 budget PCs. They had aisle after aisle of laptops and tablets though.

So are Desktops dying out in favour of the more limited tablets and laptops?

Do you still have a PC? Are you therefore an old fuddy-duddy too?

Yes... an old PC, still on XP but which is powerful enough to run all my audio recording software, so I'm keeping it going until it dies and then I'll get another desktop; the money to get a laptop capible of doing the same stuff is just so* much more expensive (certianly the last time I looked)... But differnt things for differnt jobs; I've also a very* old now netbook, which works fine... for browsing the net, E-mail, twitter etc, which is all I use it for, so its fit for purpose (though I am thinking of getintg a shiney new Nexus to replace it, soon, but only mainly becuase I want a shiney new toy to play with )

We've also a desktop in the front room, which is the 'entertainment system', in reality listen again, moovies, DVDs etc as well as used by Lodger for his work

There are stull plenty of desktops available at Best Buy and Staples and Office Max. Plus, there are probably ways to order them by mail. I'm about to buy a new one. My old computer just crashed, so there weren't many options.

Perhaps eBay would be another place to buy them -- again, they'd need to be delivered.

When the son bought his gaming pc, he ordered various bits from a website, picked them up (well, I drove him...) and put them together at home. It was not as tricky as I expected to put together, but I wouldn't have known what parts to buy.

I have three. All once dead but now born again! Running Ubuntu,Win7 and XP.
They are all on wheels so I can move them around the house to do what I want wherever I want to be.
Win7 is mostly for music and sitting on its little trolley is also a very loud sound system which woofs at the neighbours.
XP has a big screen and is mostly for picture storage and watching films (movies if you prefer)but it doubles as my office. Accounts,Bills,T*xes and so on.
Ubuntu is for researching stuff and experimentation. It is closely allied with the Arduino trolley and generally sits in the Lab.
I also have a Lenovo knee-burner running XP which I can do all of the above stuff on.
Multitasking becomes so much easier when there are multiple computers doing it.
A couple of portable hard-drives mean even more flexibility and nothing important gets lost if one of the machines dies.
Refurbished desktops are dirt-cheap round here, I can buy a Lenovo Desk-top running Win7 for around $100.

alec.

I've a win 98 desktop somewhere in the loft.... and a DOS 6 I think is still somewhere under the stairs in a cupboard I doubt if either work, or would be worth making to work;

My main desktop is on hardware version 3 I think; I spec up the bits, (not knowing a vast amount, but just researching online), send the list of bits to my computer-builder, who says yes, or no, as to whever they'll all work togehter, and then he puts them into the machine, keeping back any part so fthe old one I've reused in the next version of the machine... I bought a silly expensive case, for this reason, which will hopefully last a good many more re-versions of the computer Desperatly due an upgrade to RAM MB and processor though, and getting solid state harddrives for at least two of the HD bays/slots

We bought Osh a desktop when he started secondary school last September. He has his sister's old netbook for to-ing and fro-ing to school, and then the desktop at home for homework and (more to the point) gaming.

So, not completely died a death. But it's not like in t'old days, when you'd just have one computing device per household. Right now we have up to 15 devices in this house, all fighting over IP addresses with the router.

Mol

I've a Desktop PC,tablet and a smart phone.What more could anyone ask for?
The PC has a a 2 TB hard drive.The tablet has 32 GB of storage space.

I'm thinking that when the storage on laptops and tablets are at a similar size then maybe desktops are finished.The one issue I have with my tablet and phone however is the absolute pants batteries which reduces the actual mobility of them both.Constant use means I have to recharge on a tediously regular basis.

I had just upgraded my old desk top computer, which is so old it still has a 3 inch floppy drive? When my wife bought me an I-Pad Air, which I find fantastic!

So now my desk top, with its old tower, is now filled with the latest spec, Windows 7 (which was the latest when we upgraded?) The total cost of the upgrade was around £250 and our lad did the installation of all the techie stuff.

I still use the desk top, as well as my lap top, as it is the only one that has an SD card slot, which I still use.

That along with my I-Phone, I'm all "digitalised" not bad for a silver surfer who only got my first computer (my old desk top) when I was 50....that was 12 years ago now.

Smudger.

Ergonomically a desktop is better (says she who had to do her annual ergonomics retraining today).

Ah, floppy drives. The kids don't believe me, you know ...

Mol

My xp desktop has just died. I shall probably replace it with a 2nd hand job from a local company that sell on old corporate 'fleets' of desktops.

PP.

My bf and I each have a desktop computer, both with customized parts to exactly fit our needs. They are mostly for gaming and stuff like Photoshop. We also share a laptop but it is hardly ever used. it's not bad and it had a very good price, but you can't play games on the same high graphics settings as on a desktop and also the screen is too small.

As far as I am aware custom built desktop computers are also cheaper than laptops with the same specifications. I think a gaming laptop can cost easily 1000 Euros while each of our computers cost bout half of that.

Last time I updated my processer, motherboard, and RAM, plus harddrives, I think it was only about £500 or less, and taht was a lot of years ago now, and yet it still works seemlessly, depsite having a comparatively low spec to very* modern stuff, for the audio, with no dropouts and low latency, and taht's just using a dirt cheap second hand USB 2 sound card/interface I got second hand, becuase I@m cheap like that I could drop the latency down a few tens more miliseconds, if I forlked out for the FW external sound interface I want, but I'm cheap, and they've still not lowered the price on it enough yet Also plenty big enough case for loads of cooling fans, etc, and good air movement, plus the expensive case has a tripple 'membrane'/skin on the case, so its nice and quiet running in teh 'studeo' I believe the tower still has a floppy drive in it; filling up the hole in the front, but its not connected to anything inside If I had the at the moment, I'd upgrade to an I7 (or whatver has come since that), and the err.... newer faster RAM, plus the solid state harddrives, for recording onto one, and storing sound librarys on the other, plus a couple of standard HDs for ordinary storage porposes I tend to not bother looking at specs until such time as I've the necessary cash, and* need to upgrade, as it useually changes quite fast Solid state (err they are called that arn't they?) hds were still overly expensive last time I updated it, sadly, but I think they've come down a lot now... - I can useually get an old 'gaming graphics' card off a gamer friend, who upgrades his frequently, so I get his one year out of date thing, which is plenty enough as I don't do gaming, though it does speed up the recoridn software, as I guess that's quite a graphical thing updating and stuff on the computer as its doing its things Might treat myself to the tablet thinggy next though..

Aye! I got the whole upgrade kit from the same supplier on Ebay, including the power pack and master disc, that's why I got it so cheap.

If I had bought it all separately, it would cost twice as much?


Smudger.

Usually buying everything separately gives you better components for a better price. That's at least the case with normal shops. there may be suppliers on ebay who also sound good stuff for a good price.

Aye! our lad, (my wife's son)builds computers for various people, and he uses the same supplier all the time, I think that's why he gets such good discount.

Smudger.

I have not yet found a laptop/tablet that will fulfil all my requirements for both home and work (ie. long battery time and swift recharge; easy docking and/or comfortable desk use; Windows and power-user Office compatibility; powerful file organisation, retrieval and manipulation; image-editing and integration; sufficient RAM and graphics power to run a selection of games; none of which are particularly high-demand). To be honest that's not a massive amount to ask for, but the majority of - if not all - manufacturers seem to think I'm interested in touchscreen interfaces, endless web-browsing, Flash mini-games and gadgets. So I can see myself being desktop-dependent for quite a while yet.

B

I favour a desktop too, as I've found them better value, higher spec and more reliable than laptops.

Think I ended up buying most of my computer hardware off of Ebuyer... who were very cheap but did have a habbit of deliverying my netbook to the corner shop, and my seagate harddrives to the sandwich shop, at the opposite ends of the road ... But at least it was sorted eventually (and talking of desktops, just about to take the HD out of an old I think* either 98 or XP machine, I found in my loft today, and get rid of the actual desktop, and find out what lurks on the old harddrive ) (from memory its very old, and low spec so not worth updating/upgrading and has nothing in it, worth taking out that we need ATM) I'd still love to fire up my old DOS machine and have a DOS prompt... one final time

I don't think Desktops are dying. People just don't buy them in stores in all. Dell's website, for instance, has a great ordering system that let's you pick and choose what hardware you want to have. That's how I got mine.

Speaking of which, personally I DESPISE laptops. They're too slim and small and compact. It's annoying. Never could see the appeal in those things.