Low End Mac's Dan Knight deduces, based on his site's traffic statistics, that 4.5 years is a popular computer system upgrade interval, although I would venture to suggest that Low End Mac readers are likely more inclined to hang on to seasoned equipment than your average Mac user.

My ball park estimate would be closer to three years, although I have never actually gone that long between system upgrades myself.

An exchange of emails with a friend recently got me thinking about system upgrade intervals.

My friend, who owns a PowerBook 3400/180, noted that when he bought it new three and one-half years ago, his intention and expectation was that it would last him five years. Given the current state of his family exchequer he says, he now figures that it's going to have to last that long, and perhaps longer.

However, he is beginning to chafe about the slowness of the 3400 -- which, some readers may recall, was the fastest laptop on the planet back in 1997. Application compatibility is becoming a problem as well (he uses a Cube with recent versions of Photoshop at work), and of course OS X is not supported.

Like Dan Knight, my first Mac was a Mac Plus, which I bought used in November 1992, along with an ImageWriter II printer, both of which I still have in good working condition. In fact, the old ImageWriter is still my number one printer, which will give you some idea of how much printing I do.

However, my second Mac and first brand new one was purchased a bit more than 13 months later, in early January 1994 -- an LC 520 with a blazingly fast (compared with the Plus) 25 MHz 68030 processor, a luxurious 8 MB of RAM, and a lovely, built in Trinitron14 in. monitor.

The LC's tenure as my number one Mac (still supplanted by the Plus) marked my longest stretch between system upgrades -- two years and nearly 10 months, and I still have it too. It gets used frequently for light duty dogsbody tasks.

My next Mac was my first PowerBook -- a grayscale 5300 that I purchased in October, 1996, just as the 5300 was going out of production. I originally conceived the 'Book as being a portable backup to the LC, but I quickly fell in love with PowerBook computing, and even the poky little 9.5 in. passive matrix grayscale monitor was easier on my eyes than the Trinitron in the LC. That 5300 has been in pretty much daily use since I bought it, but it has been my daughter's computer since February, 1999, when I purchased my current WallStreet 233 MHz G3 PowerBook, about 28 months after I first got the 5300.

My WallStreet has been, and is, the best Mac I've owned so far. It seemed lightning fast after the sluggish 5300 (the latter has many virtues despite its spotty reputation, but speed is not one of them), and is still no slouch for most of the stuff I do with it. It has also been flawlessly dependable so far, with exactly zero problems to report, and it gets used about 10 hours a day, every day.

The Wall Street has been upgraded somewhat. I initially had 96 MB of RAM, but I bumped that up to 192 MB last fall. I also added a MacAlly USB PC Card adaptor last summer, which allows me use my Cirque Easy Cat trackpad and other USB peripherals. The original 2 GB IBM hard drive was replaced with a 10 GB Toshiba unit last November, and that, combined with the RAM upgrade resulted in a significant and welcome real-world speed bump.

The latest addition is a MacAlly FireWire PC Card adaptor, which allows me to connect to FireWire peripherals like hard drives and CD burners. The poor old WallStreet now bristles like a hedgehog with all the wires and dongles sticking out of it from the two PC Card adaptors, the modem port, the Ethernet networking cable, the ADB cord to my external keyboard, the mike wire for dictation software, another wire to my external speakers. I don't currently have any Serial or SCSI devices connected, but there are ports for them as well, and an S-video out port.

All this makes the WallStreet one versatile machine connectivity-wise. To review, I now have ADB, Serial, SCSI, USB, FireWire, Ethernet, S-video, sound-in, sound-out, and there is also the infrared IrDA port.

However, the PowerBook's 233 MHz processor is no longer quite up to what I'm demanding of it. In most noticeable slowdown is with dictation software. When I had the smaller hard drive and 96 MB of RAM, I found IBM ViaVoice to be borderline unusable, while MacSpeech's iListen was considerably better. After I installed the larger hard drive and RAM upgrade, ViaVoice jumped ahead of iListen in speed, even though I had not allotted the program in more RAM. Very curious. However, with either of these dictation programs I spend a lot of time waiting for them to catch up. After 26 months, I'm noticing that the Wall Street is beginning to feel a lot like the 5300 did for the last eight months or so that I used it -- that I am always pushing harder than it wants to go.

Just how much harder was underscored a couple of weeks ago when I dictated some article drafts into iListen, about six pages of longhand script. iListen has a pretty deep buffer, and when I had finished, I noticed that I had gotten well ahead of its ability to transcribe my dictation with the 233 MHz processor. Seemed like a good time for a break, so I relocated to the bathroom, read a magazine article and so forth, and then wandered back to the computer. iListen was still plugging away, but it hadn't finished what I dictated into the buffer. That's it!, I said to myself. I really need a faster computer.

One solution would be to install one of the PowerLogix Blue Chip 466 MHz or 500 MHz processor upgrade cards, but at around $600, these cost real money. If I had a 14.1 in. display on the WallStreet, I might be inclined to go that route, but the 12.1 incher on my PowerBook is also feeling very cramped lately. Consequently I am in serious upgrade mode, and will almost certainly make a move sometime in the next six months or so.

OS X adds another dimension to the upgrade equation . At this writing, I have not yet tried OS X on my WallStreet, and perhaps it would surprise me, but I am expecting sluggish performance.

These things are of course somewhat relative. My son was very pleased with the performance of OS X on his 333 MHz Lombard PowerBook until he tried it on his landlady's 450 MHz iMac. Now the Lombard seems slow.

Until OS X offers enough real world productivity advantages over 0S 9.1, I'm not likely to tolerate any significant slowdown in speed and work efficiency in order to have the latest thing anyway. I suspect that a 400 MHz G3 is the minimum system that will operate OS X with really satisfactory speed.

I have set a provisional minimum threshold for my next system at 450 MHz G4 or 500 MHz G3, and retrospect makes me wonder if that's even enough. There are rumors afloat that the G4 speed logjam is about to be dynamited by Motorola, and that there could be one gigahertz G4s in the pipeline by fall. If that's so, 450/500 MHz is going to seem awfully slow in the not too distant future

So while I'm on the upgrade path, I'm not desperate, and maybe it will be prudent to hold off until fall. The WallStreet, dictation aside, is still doing a great job.

In February, I took what I thought was the upgrade plunge, and ordered a leftover 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook from MacWarehouse Canada for the very attractive price of Can$2,995 (about $1945 US at the time), and that included a 64 MB RAM upgrade thrown in. Unfortunately, I was too late, and by the time my order got from the sales desk to the warehouse, those 500 MHz Pismos were all gone.

Averaging the intervals between my three previous workhorse system upgrades, I come up with 25 months, interestingly, just about where I am now with my WallStreet. The 13 months between the Mac Plus and the LC 520 skews the figure to the low side, but I doubt that my provisionally ideal three year upgrade interval will ever be realized by me.

My short list of candidates for a new system includes the new G4 TiBook; the G4 Cube; and possibly the not yet introduced third-generation iBook, if it is released in July at MacWorld Expo with a decent size screen. I would also still consider a 500 MHz Pismo for the right price, but they are getting thin on the ground.

Right now, for a variety of reasons, I am leaning somewhat toward a Cube/15 in. Studio Display combo, but I'm keeping my options open.

Charles W. Moore