Why older PCs make sense

An advertisement in last week's newspaper offers you a Pentium IV 2.0 Ghz branded PC for just Rs 39,000. The configuration: 256 Mb SDRAM, a 40 Gb hard disk, a CD writer, headphones with Mic, and a colour monitor.

As if this were not enough, you also get a free Epson colour printer. For an on-site one-year warranty, you pay an additional Rs 3,500 - taking the cost up to nearly Rs 42,000. You think: What am I waiting for? Let me grab the offer.

Hang on. If you are talking PCs, haste often makes for waste. Reason: Thanks to Intel's well-defined policy of crashing the prices of older microprocessors whenever they release their latest and fastest ones, PC prices tend to fall with metronomic regularity.

Which means, if a PC with the latest specs costs Rs 42,000 today, you can bet your last rupee that nine months down the line the same thing will be available for at least 20 per cent less.

Look at history. PCs that came with a mere Pentium processor, but with a multinational brandname, cost close to a lakh some years back. But the situation today has changed drastically.

So, if you are in the market to buy a PC for browsing the Internet, play some music, and generally use it as a word processor then it makes sense for you not to buy into the latest hardware on offer.

You can save anywhere between Rs 8,000-15,000 if you decide to wait a while or buy a PC with last year's hot configuration.

Take a look at how much an Intel Pentium IV costs today compared to when it was introduced nearly a year back. At that time, the price was Rs 50,000 plus.

Today, the same PC costs around Rs 42,000-43,000 for an Indian brand and Rs 2,000-3,000 more for an multinational brand.

Just imagine the cost savings if you were to wait for another 12 months. Or if you were to opt for an older Pentium.

A Pentium III machine cost between Rs 43,000-44,000 around a year back when the early Pentium IV's began arriving. But today Pentium III's are available by homegrown players like Wipro and HCL at Rs 30,000-35,000.

But why, you may ask, should anyone invest in an obsolete PC? The answer depends on what you plan to use the computer for.

If you want to put it to professional use, use hardware-intensive software packages like Photoshop, you may want to buy the latest whatever be the cost.

But for most normal uses, this is not the case. If you plan to use the PC to browse the internet, play some music, and generally use it as a word-processor, buying the latest hardware only means making yourself poorer.

Byte-sized gain

Moore's Law says that processing power doubles every 18 months. The converse side of the coin is that the prices of PCs crash by 20-25 per cent during the same 18 months.

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