Both my wife’s and my computers are getting pretty old. She was working on an original Microsoft Surface because of her initially doing private practice and needed something small and portable and later doing her Ph.D. But that Surface can’t run Win11 and it is showing its age. Plus we are showing our age. The small screen is too difficult to work with anymore with our eyes not working at well.
My old beefy computer was 1 generation too old CPU wise (Core I7 9000 series) and the motherboard didn’t have that dumb TPM security chip. Which makes Microsoft look impressively idiotic when the OS suggests to upgrade to Window 11 only later to be informed, psych!, you can’t!
At any rate. Wife likes working on a desktop or more importantly on multiple monitors for her work, she found out about the joys of being able to see all she needs to see and never having to switch windows. Something Developers have known for ages. My main setup is using 3 1440p monitors. I probably can get away with two but the third does get used enough when I’m working on programs.
Anyway… I just upgraded my dev computer. Which will eventually migrate over to my wife’s desk and she will finally get two properly sized monitors. 1 4K and one of my 1440p monitors. And I will get get myself a new machine as well. So the current upgrade was moving from a CORE i7 which was a 4 core 8 threads machine with 32 GB to a CORE Ultra 5 with 14 cores and 14 threads. The new CPU should wipe the floor with the old one…
But currently I’m in the process of installing software. And I swear, HP printer software is the $#@*&$^@( worst. Seems to be installing slower than on the CORE i7… And it just failed! Reinstalling software usually takes a day or two anyway. It should be faster now that the computer has a NVMe drive at its boot drive. It “should” help.
After this I need to think about which computer config I want now. Intel’s Ultra 9 processors seem to want to brick themselves over time. AMD seems tempermental when it comes to configurations. I think I will try going full AMD this time though. Including graphics card even though I have always had issues with ATI/AMD/Radeons in the past. I’m hoping things have improved a lot since the early 3D rendering days. I might wait a little bit, maybe after Christmas, to see what might be coming down in the future.
I was also thinking of upgrading the displays. I’ve been spoiled with 4K at work for a long time. Working on 1440p is still good, better than 1080p. But the resolution makes life so much nicer. I was thinking about that Samsun Odyssey G9 Neo which is basically 2 30″ 4K displays in one big screen. But the price tag! You can get cheaper 2x 30″ 4K displays. Sure it’s not as nice as seamless screen but I don’t know if it’s worth it. Right now it’s $900 CAN$ cheaper than MSRP but that’s going away in a few days. I’ll see what’s going to be available on Black Friday. I don’t expect this display to be on sale again but you never know. Crossing fingers.