There Is A Time For Everything, and Everything In Its Time

I subscribe to any number of tech-oriented newsletters. Some are published by one-man operations and some by media giants. This is a tale of one of them.

I read every copy of Steve Bass’s Home Office newsletter. Not because I think it necessarily has any astounding revelation about home offices, but because he often has things to say that may, upon reflection, cause me to think of something I can improve or may have missed otherwise. This time, though, he missed the boat :). It may be due to Late Summer Fatigue. I don’t know, but I had to comment to him about the latest column.

It was all about when it’s right to upgrade or to buy a new system. He seems to lean toward waiting for PCI-Express and some other goodies that are ‘just down the road’. I took exception to that view! Now that you know the background, here’s my comment to him:

You’ve touched, ever so lightly, on a subject that has lost me more sleep in the past couple of months than my college senior finals ever did.

It’s the subject of upgrading or buying a complete system, in part. In my case, there really wasn’t a question- it was definitely ‘sort of’. What I mean by that is that I knew it was time to make some changes and the money is coming in at the end of this month, so the timeframe is set in stone. I know that makes no sense to people like Tom Mainelli, but for common folk, it’s all too true: If you let money sit around past the time that you get hold of it, the amount remaining varies inversely to the number of hours since you acquired it. Fancy words, I know. What it means in the real world is that if you let money sit around for more than 24 hours, the chances of any of it remaining at the end of a week are so close to zero that the difference is only a difference to a mathematician.

In practical terms, you don’t leave money lying around, you spend it as fast as you can swipe a credit card or it’s going to disappear.

Now that we’ve taken care of that ‘waiting’ nonsense, let’s take a bead on the other issue that makes ‘waiting’ a bad move- the concept of time. In theoretical terms, waiting could be a good thing. It could land you range of a PCI-Express motherboard (take that, Steve’s editor!). In the real world, technology on the bleeding edge is a moving target. As soon as you sneak up on the bleeding edge, you find that it’s not there any more. It’s moved on. So in those terms, waiting for PCI-Express is a bad idea. You might gain PCI-X slot(s), but by that time, you’ll find some other must-have technology, for which you’ll wait even more. And again. And again. One day you find that you’re sitting in front of a terribly OLD computer that is slow and falling apart (and with an empty bank account!) and you’ve never actually bought a new system. What a waste!

So you won’t find ME being caught in either of those traps. When the money comes in, I’ll spend it immediately, build my own new system, and be sitting there enjoying the speed and power long before Tom ever gets NEAR buying a new system.

There you have it. Don’t be fooled into waiting- BUY NOW!