hw is not that cheap

http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0502.petreley.html


Why does everybody believes we are rich spoiled kids who can buy anything on earth? Yes, hardware is cheap (that's why I spent 3k bucks on this computer, right?) but people have more important things to buy all the time. Food, rent, insurances, phone bill, electricity bill, bill bill, etc.

Yes, CDs are cheap and I dare telling anybody to buy some. But for those who don't have technical skills that can be quit expensive to upgrade a computer. W'ere talking to at least 70-130$ (and still going up) for anything PLUS 70$ as the starting fee for the tech and another 20-40$ per hour for the tech again. We're talking about a minimal 170 to 200$ cost for just upgrading the ram, cpu or hdd.

Back then when I had my tech support job and the fat paycheck that came with I could have bought hardware anytime I wanted but right now I only make 100$ for two weeks... So when somebody in a forum suggest to merely buy some more hardware rather than to provide a strong solution I just get pissed off. The hardware I have right now is working flawlessly, no thanks.

Not expensive, y'ah right. Whatever, just ventilating...

Though it's never said, "X is cheap" in the computer world seems to mean "X is cheap [relative to what it used to be]". Unfortunately, that's not relative to income.

Cheap doesn't mean low cost. A Civic is a cheap car but it still takes a pretty big chunk of money to get ahold of one. Cheap is a term that is used in relation to other similar products. For example: a Celeron processor is "cheaper than" a Pentium 4 processor. It's not logical to compare the price of food, for example, to the price of a Hard Drive (unless you masticate your hard drives...), and then say that the hard drive is expensive because of your comparison. When comparing a hard drive now to a hard drive of ten years ago, however, it's very safe to say that the hard drive now is pretty 'cheap'. That's what 'cheap hardware' means. And, actually, buying more powerful hardware is usually a very viable option to fixing minor performance problems these days - but only if you can afford it. If not, then fixing the the underlying problem may be harder work, but whatcha gonna do? (I'm poor too... )

I think the angle you want to look at is that to fix a given problem, often it's very cheap to upgrade a specific component to get around it. For instance, if your PC is running slow , upgrading your RAM is a lot cheaper than having someone play with your PC and clean up everything and reinstall and all of that fun stuff. Running out of memory? Upgrading your hard drive is fairly cheap compared to either having someone else safely remove files, or them having to come in and fix things after you deleted that "Windows" directory that you never saved anything to. Sadly, I've actually seen it happen...