Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

On Sep 25, 4:09 pm, Jeff Liebermann <je...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:48:13 -0000, mrdarr...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
There's Craigslist, too - a little less risky than eBay.

Actually, I've had more problems buying from Dell and the various Dell
refurbished online stores, than from either eBay or Cragislist.
<http://www.delloutlet.com>
<http://www.dfsdirectsales.com>
<http://www.dellauction.com>

Looks like it might be the Dell Vostro then.

You're right that you can get a much better new machine for "not much
more money". However, at the original price, you can get TWO Dell
SX260's for the price of a new Vostro.

Another reason why not to go (too) used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

One of the 14 SX260's had literally all of the electrolytics
simulating a volcano. Strangely, it worked just fine, but was
obviously going to blow up soon. The eBay vendor sent me a
replacement motherboard, which I installed, and lived happily ever
after. I also tried to repair the board with the blown caps, but
managed to rip out a few too many plated through holes, which
destroyed the board.

A computer tech here at work complained that the Dell desktops aren't
that great. (The laptops are good, he says.) He's had to replace WAY
too many motherboards and Western Digital hard drives on our Dell
Optiplex SX280s.

Are you sure you don't have it backwards? Almost all my office and
home machines are Dell desktops. I don't have any problems with those
(other than the usual moving parts failures). It's the laptops that
are dying on me. If the laptop doesn't blow up, the giant brick of a
laptop power supply blows up. Also, plenty of dead LCD CCFL power
supplies. I won't claim that the desktops are perfect, but I do have
far fewer problems with them.


Interesting. No I don't think I have it backwards, and at least two
of my co-workers in my unit (there are about a dozen of us in my unit)
had their mainboards replaced on failure to boot - problem I think was
bad caps. And at least one WD HDD replacement.

Our computer tech is one of three who help about 200 of us.



The SX260's all came with Hitachi 40GB Travelstar laptop drives. I've
had VERY bad luck with the 3.5" Travelstar drives, but these 2.5"
laptop drives seem to be surviving so far. Out of 14, I've had no
failures of any type. I also monitor the S.M.A.R.T. statistics using
SpeedFan:
<http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php>
which has been quite useful at predicting hard disk failures. No
unusual problems so far.


Very strange! I've heard IBM/Hitachi is one of the most reliable
available.


Our policy at work is, Save your work to the Network Drive (file
server, backed up nightly), not to your C: drive !

Good plan. I use two mirrored file servers and/or NAS (network
attached storage) boxes. I don't just backup the work. I do image
backups of the entire hard disk so that the effort necessary to
restore Humpty Dumpty is much less than the mess produced by
overlapping incremental or partial backups. Think of backup in terms
of how long will it take to get you back to normal operation. It's
often much longer than you would initially suspect.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558 je...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
#http://802.11junk.com je...@xxxxxxxxxx
#http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS


Yeah, I work off my C:, and then schedule a batch-file backup with
7zip and then transfer that big file to our network drive overnight.

Michael

.

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