Intel Corp (INTC)

[mmoy]

The advantages of newer PCs:

- Better power consumption to CPU horsepower
- Faster buses
- USB 3.0 instead of USB 2.0
- Newer graphics interfaces
- SATA 3 support
- More likely to get SSDs over HDDs
- Windows 7 vs Windows XP or Vista

There's a funny problem for those looking to upgrade their circa-2008 PCs to SSDs. Systems had SATA2 support - when you put in a SATA3 drive, it isn't recognized as the older hardware doesn't know SATA3 so it bumps the performance level down to SATA1.

There are a lot of complaints about it on the web but, if you're on a laptop, then you're stuck. One of my old laptops has this issue - I added a nice, speedy Intel SSD but I didn't get as much of a performance bump as I expected to.

I'm pretty sure that my home desktop has the same issue but I could always add an internal PCIe SATA3 controller to access a SATA3 SSD at SATA3 speeds.

The downside to buying a new machine? Windows 8.1.