bowel movement expert wrote:
The only things I do on a computer are internet, basic applications (word, excel, powerpoint, etc) and media on iTunes. I don't play games or edit video or anything of that nature. Is there any benefit at all in getting a computer with a high-end processor? One consideration is future-proofing myself against obsolesence. Will my computer be more useful 5 years from now if I get a quad-core processor now instead of a dual-core processor?
The biggest problem people have with "second tier" machines is the way they manage them. More often than not it's unnecessary services running in the background, routine maintenance (defrag, disk cleanup, etc) that is not done regularly and bloated software (IE/firefox, outlook, word, excel) that slows a machine down. Take a machine from 3 years ago, strip it down to core applications and it will do just fine for another couple of years. If nothing else, add more memory, remove programs you haven't run in more than 6 months, disable unnecessary services and you should be fine.
Understand that the trend of new machines is to focus on the integration of more powerful graphics. Essentially, the TV and the PC will merge a few years down the road; but, machines are not there yet. Most people don't really need the true computing power multi-core machines offer in efforts to compensate for under-developed OS graphics subsystems as a lot of this processing if off-loaded to the graphics card anyway. Much of the current marketing drive to dual/quad processors is unnecessary: 1) because software is rarely written to take advantage of parallel cores as of yet and 2) most applications don't utilize that much juice because they are still focusing on the 32-bit address space. Many of the hidden utilities absorbing the power of modern processors are internal housekeeping and, in most cases, truly unnecessary. Get a cheap machine, keep it clean and save your money.