[Thermodyne]

The upgrade path is different today than it was in the past. Memory is evolving just as fast as
CPU’s, so the benefit of reusing the motherboard are greatly diminished during an upgrade. These days we are often finding that a replacement CPU is a cheap upgrade, and cost effective for a one or two year SLE. We can flash the BIOS and the replace a 500mhz PIII with a Celeron getting a 100% increase in speed theoretically. Add a new hard drive and we have less than $150 dollars in a system that we expect to get 3 more years out of. CD and floppy readers get pulled or disabled so no troubles there. We run Citrix, so CPU speed was not a big issue, but now that we have rolled out with a compliant serverbased antivirus system, the older workstations are beginning to really suffer. We have some 400MHz Deskpros that take 16 minutes to boot and scan a 20Gig drive.

Also, someone posted about AMD being the inexpensive upgrade path. Need to look at the
price sheets again there. Amd has started a campaign to regain profitability and XP’s are priced right up there with P4’s these days. Performance is great on both brands, so it is a case of preference these days.