Coping with technology churn

My mother was very fond of the phrase "You get what you pay for" and used it extensively in her dealings with everyone from shoe salesmen to salmon salesmen.

Part of my heritage has been a predisposition to think that way. I have found out the hard way that getting what you pay for is not necessarily how the IT world works.

I don't pay for expensive personal printers. Why? Because with PC printers the business model is based around the consumables - in particular the ink. I find it useful to think of personal printers as costing nothing when compared to the ongoing cost of the cartridges.

Moreover, technology changes too fast for arguments around "hard wearing" or "room for expansion" to be worth much. More likely than not, you will want to trade up to a new printer in couple of years anyway so why pay for future-proofing?

Also worth considering is what will happen to the type of printer cartridge your printer uses when it ceases (as it will) to be the current model? In my experience, cartridges for "old" models get more and more expensive with every passing year to the point where you are better off "jumping" to the next generation.

I don't pay extra for expandability in my PCs. Why? Because the rate of change in the industry means that by the time I feel the need for an "upgrade" I also will feel the need for a complete new box. Right now - 2008 - is a particularly interesting time I think. Especially for laptops. I would not be surprised to see solid state storage having a dramatic ability to make "current" technology "legacy".

I don't pay extra for full personal system backups. Why? Because technology moves so fast that I would want to be able to take advantage of a new operating system, new cuts of applications etc. if and when I'm setting up on a new machine. Instead, I keep a second laptop warm for emergency use. All my data is on network servers anyway. If I do have a catastrophic failure I switch to the failover machine and move my new box to whatever today's "current" operating system environment looks like. If I really, really need the old environment I will put it up as a virtual image on my new machine. To a rough approximation, any new machine I get is more than powerful enough to run all my old stuff under an image and still have acres of room to spare on top.

I don't pay extra for desktop machines that have "more power" for software development tasks than laptops. Laptops are getting so powerful these days that there is no "laptop tax" to be paid for normal software development environments. I always go for laptops that have docking stations. As well as expanding the number of USB ports at my immediate disposal, they appear to be the last bastion of the parallel port.

I like having one of these around as I have some perfectly serviceable pre-USB printers - with reasonably cheap laser-printer style toner cartridges! - that I do not want to render useless.

Source: itworld.com