Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:14:14 -0700, mrdarrett@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

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.

I've seen far too many machines with the low-ESR capacitors blown. I'm
working on a Dell Optiplex GX270 (2.4GHz) as I type, replacing most of
the capacitors. What a pain, but at least I have a Pace desoldering
station to make it easy. Dell has had its share of capacitor
problems, as have other manufacturers. Mostly, those ended with
products made before about 2003. I haven't seen bad capacitors in the
Optiplex E5xx or 3xx series of desktops, or later. Incidentally, I'm
typing this on an old Dimension 8100, which is one of about 15 that
has not given me any problems (other than finding cheap RAMBUS chips
and the usual filth in the fans problem).

And at least one WD HDD replacement.

Sorry. I forgot to mumble something about the hard disks. Every few
years, the various disk drive manufacturers take turns selling garbage
for hard disks. The problem is that it often takes several years for
the drives to fail. By that time, they're out of warranty. About 7
years ago, IBM drives were the hot ticket. They were fast, silent and
cheap, so I used them everywhere. 3 years later, I was replacing them
at my expense. IBM gave up and sold out to Hitachi, which initially
shipped the remaining inventory, which again failed in about 3 years.
It took the loss of a few OEM's before Hitachi got the clue and fixed
the problems.

I won't rattle off my history of hard disk disasters. I've been
burned by literally all the major manufacturers (Fujitsu, IBM,
Hitachi, Maxtor, WD, and Seagate) at some time since I started
fighting computers about 25 years ago. They just have bad lots, bad
processes, bad design, or tiny screwups, which result in bad drives
that take a while to self destruct. Recently, I've been using Seagate
drives, with almost no failures or problems. However, I'm not holding
my breath or assuming my good luck will continue forever. If history
repeats itself, as it seems to always do, Seagate will eventually cut
corners to save a few pennies, and introduce a problem.

As for Western Dismal, they are the worst. Most of their drives died
within the warranty period and were replaced by nearly identical
refurbished drives, that also died in a few months. The office next
door went through several in their Sony desktops before they gave up
and let me install a replacement Seagate. That was about a year ago,
and I've sworn off WD since then. I have no idea if their current
offerings are any better (or worse) and have no interest in finding
out the hard way.

You can sorta get a clue by looking at the warranty lifetimes. The
current retail Seagate Barracuda drives all show a 5 year warranty. WD
Caviar offers a 1 year warranty. Only the WD Raptor has a 5 year
warranty.

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

The usual ratio is 1 tech per 100 desktops. I know of some companies
with 150 desktops per tech. If IT also supports the servers, the
ratio is much less. If your organization needs 70 desktops to tech
ratio, then there might be some kind of equipment, environmental, or
organizational problem.

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.

As I indicated, it depends on IBM drive type and model. It was bad
enough that there was a class action suit against IBM for shipping
junk:
<http://www.ibmdeskstar75gxplitigation.com/>
I got the option of 25 blank cdrom's or a 15% discount on future
purchases from IBM. Swell.

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.

You don't have a backup unless you've done a dry run and tried to
restore it. 7zip is just a file compress/uncompress utility. It's
not really suitable for backup and restore. Batch files and even some
backup utilities have problems when they encounter open files, thus
making file by file backups a crap shoot. That's another reason why I
do image backups.

The most important part to backup is the bloated registry. I suggest
ERUNT:
<http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/>

About 5 weeks ago, one of my customers had their hard disk go bad. It
was an old 20GB IBM Deskstar that I should have replaced long ago. No
warning with SpeedFan this time. I was recovering from surgery and
really didn't need a major project. So, I dragged out the last image
backup, which fortunately was only a month old at the time, crammed in
a new (Seagate) disk drive, recreated the boot record, updated the
BIOS (oops), used Norton Ghost 2003 to restore the image, and was back
in full operation in about 4 hours (I was moving kinda slow at the
time). All the bookkeeping data was backed up daily to USB flash, so
restoring that was trivial. Try doing that with your file by file or
incremental backup system.

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

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