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what is the biggest hardware/upgrade jump you have ever experienced?

jefhatfield

jefhatfield

Retired
Original poster
Jul 9, 2000
8,803
0
let's hear your experiences

my biggest jump in computer hardware/computing power was when i went from an old performa 600 with floppy and 33.6 modem to a power tower pro 180, internal zip 100, 56k modem, and twin turbo graphics accelerator card

since then, i have bought new machines but the increase in power has been more gradual and predictable
 
From pocket calculator to iMac (original) the calculator was better in one way however because it had a solar panel.
 
Chappers said:
From pocket calculator to iMac (original) the calculator was better in one way however because it had a solar panel.
Click to expand...

well if you put it that way...he he...the biggest jump i had was going from a typewriter to a mac classic...no more liquid paper :)

and that was back in 1993 and i was nearly done with college...i remember turning in papers done on a typewriter while most of the students had some sort of word processor or computer
 
My Computers:
Commodore 64
Amiga 500
Amiga 1200
Pentium III
iMac G4
PowerMac G4
PowerMac G5

The change from the C64 to the Amiga 500 was the most noticable. It was a whole new world. Compared to that all the rest have been gradual.

This year: new G5.
 
The Mac I had before the original G4 iBook I'm using now was a Performa 5400 with about 120MHz or something. However, I did spend a long long time over on the darkside with various Pentiums. Changing from a P4 1.7 to my 800MHz G4 was actually quite a leap for the things I use computers for. That could probably be put down to the OS though... :p
 
up until may of last year... i had been a PC user..

Pentium2 450mhz with 256mb ram (had been upgraded from 128). with 60gig hard drive... 12x burner

AMD Athlon 2400+, 512mb ram, 160gig hard drive, 48x burner, dvd burner...

kind of a big jump processor-wise... technically i believe the 2400 is 2.01 ghz... which means a jump of 2000mhz :p and we all know the athlon performs a lot more instructions per cycle than say.. the pentium 2 i was using :p
 
From a 604e (?) based Mac clone with a floppy, 64mb of RAM and OS 8.5 to... a dual 1.42 G4 with 2gb RAM, superdrive, FW800 etc and Jaguar :D
 
when i get my new home machine, it will be the biggest jump for me... work doesnt count...

at home i'm using an iMac DV 500 G3... it hates life. either going with a mac mini in the very near future, or a Rev B G5iMac... regardless, it's going to be a VERY noticable difference...
 
The jump from my Performa 630 to the PowerMac 7500 in ~1997/8 has to be the biggest jump, although it took two steps, as I actually used the 7500 a couple of weeks before upgrading with a 4GB HD, G3 card and 64 MB RAM (making it a 245 MHz G3 with an awsome 80 MB RAM and a total of 5 GB HD (4+1)). The pimped 7500 was FANTASTIC compared to the P630 from 1994... ;)
 
hmmm...hardware wise, a 200mhz K6 w/ 32mb of RAM and a 2gb drive from 1997 to a 1.6ghz P4 w/ 256 RAM and a 40gb drive and a cd burner, but in terms of software, windows xp to panther. that was awesome. it's also amazing how a 1.25ghz emac is faster after 2 months than a 2.4ghz celeron is out of the box...
 
broken_keyboard said:
My Computers:
Commodore 64
Amiga 500
Amiga 1200
Pentium III
iMac G4
PowerMac G4
PowerMac G5

The change from the C64 to the Amiga 500 was the most noticable. It was a whole new world. Compared to that all the rest have been gradual.

This year: new G5.
Click to expand...

Yup. For me it was C-64 to Mac 512. Biggest SOFTWARE upgrade was Mac OS 9 to 10.1 -- on the same computer, a Ti400. That was almost as big an upgrade as the hardware upgrade.
 
wordmunger said:
Biggest SOFTWARE upgrade was Mac OS 9 to 10.1 -- on the same computer, a Ti400. That was almost as big an upgrade as the hardware upgrade.
Click to expand...

Yes I can imagine that would be quite a shock. My first Mac had OS 10.1, so I wouldn't really know. Though I played with Classic just out of curiosity, and actually quite liked it (but that was just playing, not trying to get serious work done).
 
I just made the jump from my old iMac G3 400Mhz to my New 20" iMac G5 1.8 GHz. That was a pretty big jump. The other night I opened around 20 20+MB Photoshop files by highlighting them and hitting "open". The G3 would have laughed at me before giving me the endless spinning beachball. I can't imagine what my Power Mac 7500 w/ 128Mb ram would have done!?

Going from the 15" CRT to the 20" flat screen is a pretty big improvement as well.

rk
 
386SX 16Mhz to 486DX-2 66Mhz... The peformance was on the order of 10x. :D
 
I went from a massive tower desktop 15” CRT Pentium 120mhz/16MB RAM/1GBM HD/MS Win95 to a 12” iBook G3 700Mhz/384MB RAM/30GB HD/OSX10.2 and then on to a 17” iMac G5 1.8Ghz/1GB Ram/80GB HD/OSX 10.3.8

The biggest upgrade amongst all that? Buying a two buttoned mouse for my Mac!

Seriously, between each machine there was a gap of at least a month and as each was purchased because the previous one had died I never have two running side-by-side to make a great comparison. Each seems a little slicker that the last but each has been slower in use than what I was using at work at the time so have never been awe inspiring. My present iMac is the best so far it’s about as quick it seems as my work Wintel box but does it’s thing differently and imho better for my needs. I’m sure if I ever get round to replacing the HD in my iBook I’ll be amazed how slow it seems and couldn’t go back to it but then I could never go back to a one buttoned mouse.
 
As far as I how I thought about it goes, I'd say it was going from an 8086 PC to a 286 with VGA, 3.5" floppy, etc. That seemed like a huge jump to me, but then I was only 9 years old :p. In reality I guess the biggest jump is when I went from a Pentium 500 with 128 MB RAM and 6 GB HD with Windows 98 to an Athlon XP2000+ with 100 GB HD, 512 MB RAM, DV500+ video capture card and Windows XP. Of course, I switched from that computer to my current Powerbook, and that's been the most positive upgrade I've done as far as satisfaction goes.
 
Biggest jump for me was from a Performa 6200CD to my iBook G3.

Performa: 75mHz PowerPC, 8 MB RAM, 1 gig HD, 1 MB VRAM, 8x CD-ROM, OS 7.5

iBook: 800mHz G3, 384 MB RAM, 30 gig HD, 32 MB VRAM, 32x CD-ROM (I think), OSX 10.3

Had two PCs in between there but this was the biggest jump. I think that moving from OS7.5 to OSX was a big part of the jump. I still have the Performa at my parent's house. I should dig it up sometime and see what it can do. This is the best way to see how far computers have come in the past few years. Get out the old one and watch how slow it is and how many programs have been improved/created.
 
I can't pinky swear that these spec's are all exactly right:

Performa 575 with a 33MHz processor, 20MB RAM, 250MB hdd, CD-ROM.
PowerMac 7200 75MHz, 64MB RAM, 1GB hdd, CD-ROM.
PowerMac G3, 266MHz, 128MB RAM, 4GB hdd, CD-ROM, external CD-RW.
iMac G4, 800MHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB hdd, SuperDrive.
PowerBook G4, 1.33GHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB hdd, Combo.

Biggest change, though, would have to be going from a Palm Tungsten T3 to the PowerBook G4 1.33. Runs Excel better... :rolleyes: :D
 
I'm on the verge of jumping from a G4 500 MHz to either a Mini 1.25 GHz or an iMac G5 1.8 GHz. Wish me luck on the G5!
 
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