Tech/Musings { When technology attacks
I am sad today. My beloved 21" SONY Trinitron is starting to show its age. This monitor was a birthday gift from Nerdwife many years ago (at least 5). It has had a long and distinguished service and has been my window into the virtual, allowing me to save the world, the galaxy, the universe (...as well as control them...) on countless occasions and through countless epic campaigns. But its machine spirit is starting to tire. It seems when it gets warm now the screen images get very very fuzzy. At first I thought the fan blew out on my Radeon, but the fuzziness remains even when the computer is off (when running the video test). I turned it off last night and went to bed. This morning it appears to be much healthier, the images are sharp, but the screen brightness is getting brighter no matter how much I turn it down and correct gamma. I have looked into a new monitor and have found a 22" Gateway TFT-LCD that I feel will suit my needs (ultra-high resolution and low latency <5ms) so it should suit me and my gaming habits as well as the fact it is energy star and uses less energy than my monitor (which is also energy star).
But this brings me to my next feeling, shame. Electronics are such wastes. They consume a lot of resources to make, they consume a lot of energy to use (especially older ones), and they can't be 'fixed' like things used to be fixed. You ship them off somewhere or to someone and they replace a board, often at the cost of what a new widget would cost. That is if you can find someone. The art of TV and monitor repair is disappearing. I use my gear well past its expected life of 3 years. I can often get 5-9 depending upon the piece of equipment. Video cards I get about 3-4, monitors 5-9, disk drives about 5, mobos about 4-5, CDROM/DVD drives, I used to be able to get 4+, but the last few have only lasted 1-3. OSes I tend to get about 5-7 years out of, I ran Win98 until 2003. I am still running Win2000 on another computer. WinXP has been treating me well and I will keep it around until someone can prove Vista is a better gaming platform, which I doubt it will be.
I don't know where I was going with this, upon re-reading apparently no where, but just felt like posting something random.
1 comment:
1) All things decay with time. Manufactured goods, OS installs, etc.
2) A good Trinitron monitor was always a good longer term investment in tech. A quality CRT above 20" is worth keeping around, generally. Its not to say that I don't prefer my dual-screen 19" LCD setups at home and also at work.
3) Electronics have a much shorter useful lifespan than other goods. Things progress very quickly. A trashcan from 100 years ago is probably as good as a trashcan made today, but a computer from 10 years ago is unrecycled waste.
4) Tech is very dirty. Electronics manufacturing takes tons of water, energy, and pollutes like crazy. There is something like 400 chemicals in a CRT monitor, 200 of which are toxic, including several pounds of lead. In this regard, the new stuff is better, because it pollutes less and takes less energy to run.
5) The art of repair is becoming a lost art, but mostly because the costs of labor are prohibitive, and because the costs of manufacturing are low. Also, since technology progresses so quickly, very few people would go to the trouble of designing things to be fixable. When a video card breaks at work I don't get out a soldering iron; I yank it out and slap in a new one. This relationship with tech repair may shift back if at some point the cost of manufacture rises (due to raw materials or energy costs going up).
6) I average 4-5 years on any given computer system or component. I do tend to keep legacy hardware around. I have an old Windows 95 laptop, a Windows 98SE box, and a Windows ME (ugh) box I keep, but those are for retrogaming where emulation just doesn't quite work. Day to day, I'm using Windows XP, and have no immediate plans on 'upgrading' to Vista (I am not going to pay hundreds of dollars just for Aero Glass). My next major computer will probably be a Linux file server, and my laptop will be the bulk of my computing for the forseeable future.
Post a Comment