The upgrade blues are hard to fight. If you buy a new computer, the manufacturer is almost 100 percent guaranteed to come out with a new model with cooler stuff at a lower price within 90 days.

Is your production Mac or PC looking a little long in the tooth? Have you been drooling over some new machine you saw in a magazine? If you answered yes, then you have the beginnings of the dreaded computer user disease called upgrade blues. The upgrade blues are hard to fight. If you buy a new computer, the manufacturer is almost 100 percent guaranteed to come out with a new model with cooler stuff at a lower price within 90 days. However, there are only so many years left on your current computer before it literally won't run the software or hardware you need (the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop or USB, for instance). Meanwhile, computer hardware and software manufacturers are coming up with new products to entice you into buying before you really need to. (They have to stay in business, right?)

There you sit, caught between getting work done efficiently with faster new equipment and getting by with what you already have. What should you do: buy, upgrade or punt?

One of the things you have to decide is whether your current hardware is worth upgrading. Would it be worth the investment-or just spending good money on a hopelessly outdated machine? Things you need to look at before upgrading include: operating systems, processor speed/performance, connectivity options (USB, FireWire, SCSI) and maximum RAM capacity.

Mac Upgrades

Let's take a look at the upgrade issues from the point of view of the Mac. If you want to run OS X, you will need at least a Beige G3, but you will probably find that a Blue and White G3 is a better place to start for upgrading. Although OS X will run on a Beige G3, they are slow machines that do not contain USB or FireWire, two very useful connectivity options. Conversely, if you own a lot of narrow SCSI (50 pin) devices that you like, such as scanners, then upgrading past a Beige G3 will force you to buy new accessories or a narrow SCSI card.

Secondly, OS X is a device-intensive operating system. It likes a lot of RAM, fast processors and a fast video card, which again points to a Blue and White as your starting point for upgrading. Hardware prices have made older equipment less attractive for upgrading, because new ones cost so much less. You can buy a new 733 MHz G4 for $1,700 and add a gigabyte of RAM for less than $200, making a screaming machine for less than $1,900. Older machines would need more expensive RAM, big hard drives, a FireWire or USB card and a processor upgrade to be useful, but they still wouldn't be as fast or modern as the $1,900 machine.

PC Upgrades?

The same issues exist on the Windows side. Windows 2000 and XP need powerful and new machines to run well. Although Windows 2000 minimum requirements are a 133 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM, you would want a much more powerful machine to do publishing work with it (four times that to start with is a good guess, i.e. a 500 MHz Pentium and 256 MB of RAM). Windows XP Professional requires a minimum of a

300 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM, but also would perform much better with a lot more hardware. So if you already own a machine that is well in that range (500 to 800 MHz and a lot of RAM), then it is probably worth keeping. Otherwise, since prices are pretty low for Windows computers ($1,200 buys a lot of computer these days), you should consider buying a new PC instead.

Software Compatibility?

The other issue is software. Photoshop needs tons of RAM, monster processors and very fast hard drives to work well. Photoshop is one of the most processor-intensive programs out there, short of 3D modeling. And to help out hardware manufacturers, Adobe keeps upping the ante. If you are a big Photoshop user, you need to stay up on your hardware. If you work mainly with QuarkXPress, you can lag behind the modern hardware a little, but you will still need to stay compatible with your customers, service providers and the industry.