Re: a good PC?
- From: "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:34:14 GMT
John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 22 Nov 2006 04:23:27 +0000, Eeyore
<rabbitsfriendsandrelations@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On 20 Nov 2006 10:20:49 -0800, mrdarrett@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
Once again, this Dell crap has messed up my life. I bought two
identical, fairly expensive "workstations", one for home and one for
work. Each has two identical Maxtor drives, plus I got a couple of
spares. Once things were all set up, I image copied the "work" C:
drive (with all apps installed) to the home system C: drive, plus
dropped off image copies onto the spares.
Good thing I did that. I've had two of the Maxtor C: drives fail, one
at home and recently one at work. Going back to the images, and
restoring all work in process and mail and all, was an enormous pain.
I lost some mail and such between backups, so we sent the failed drive
to one of those recovery companies, and they got almost everything
back (on a new IDE drive) for a mere $1600. That's in a USB adapter
box now, so I can copy back the stuff I lost.
The Dells are a horror inside, what with stupid drive mounts and
horrific cabling. Swapping drives is a nightmare. The floppy barely
works, the case design is sooo bad.
So, how do I get a *good* pc? I wanted to buy a couple of HP ProLiant
ML350 servers, a big tower package with redundant power supplies,
redundant fans, and eight front-accessable hot-plug hard drive slots.
I figure I could run RAID/1 on a pair, run daily backups to drive 3,
occasionally image copy the system to drive 4, and still have a slot
or two to play with. Figure I could buy 2 of the server boxes and 10
hard drives. We'd have to add a floppy and a DVD burner, but that
seems to be doable.
But HP claims I can't run XP on these boxes, just some weird Microsoft
server stuff. And they won't say why. Bummer. Something to do with
RAID management? (I thought that might be in the bios, not sure.) Or
some silly marketing rules that Micro$oft makes?
OK, the ProLiants are out. Anybody know of any other way to get a
really reliable computer with RAID and reasonably easy to swap drives,
not necessarily hot-plug?
John
Come to think of it, I think Alienware makes a pretty reputable brand
of computer. Mostly geared towards gamers, though.
If you do go the roll-it-yourself route, make sure to get some Arctic
Silver thermal paste for your CPU/heatsink fan. It's much better than
the silicone stuff - worth every penny of the $12 or so for the tube.
(I was able to overclock a 2.7 GHz Celeron to just over 3 GHz with it;
I ran the Prime95 torture tests overnight to see if the CPU could
handle the overclocking.)
Michael
This looks pretty good:
http://www.alienware.com/product_detail_pages/MJ-12_7550a/mj-12_7550a_features.aspx?SysCode=PC-MJ12-7550-A&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT
http://www.alienware.com/product_detail_pages/MJ-12_7550a/mj-12_7550a_features_int.aspx?SysCode=PC-MJ12-7550-A&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT#sub
Could you live with the Alien logo on the front though ?
That is off-putting, for sure. I could stick something less repulsive
over it, like a smiley face or one of those black velvet pictures of a
kitten. I do have a nice Dragon Lady (U-2 spy plane) patch that's
about the right size.
http://www.globalaircraft.org/planes/u-2_dragon_lady.pl
We did some rush work for the Skunk Works guys and we told them we
didn't need more money, just a bunch of patches and posters.
Optional front-panel hot-plug RAID drives, lots of big fans, looks
like good, clean packaging and acoustics. I think I'll try one.
Looks like Dell is going cheap low-end to compete on price, and using
the Alienware brand for the good stuff. We'll see.
I *want* to pay a lot for a really solid PC. What I don't want is to
pay a lot and get the same old junk.
There's little better you can do than custom built in that case.
Have you considered drives in caddies btw ?
I do like the idea of buying a system that just works when you plug it
in, and a RAID setup that comes working with all the utilities and
whatever it needs, and with support. Alienware will apparently set
everything up and then furnish a system disk image on a DVD, so you
can always restore the system to its exact as-shipped state, after
Windows eventually punches enough holes into itself.
It looks like there is no standard packaging for hot-swap drives, just
a number of different plug-in adapters that the actual drive fits
into. Is that a caddie?
This is so annoying. A computer is supposed to be a tool, not a
project.
John
Some people like these servers:
<http://www.chilisystems.com/index.jsp>
Several computer techs around here remove a lot of those $20 drive
caddies because if intermittent hardware problems. One shop gave me a
box full they had removed to make systems more stable.
--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
.
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