Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Joerg <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:


Sometimes the challenge is how to un-bloat that without deleting that one entry that was really important.


It's a serious problem for me. I find it difficult to charge a
customer about 45 minutes of shop time to so nothing more than
*REMOVE* software. Some uninstalls are really tedious the ugly. Some
versions of McAfee Anti-Everything is a good example of one that can
take forever to remove. An other part of the bloatware problem is
removing the archived software from the machine so that the hard disk
backup doesn't have to backup 4GBytes of junkware every time. If they
dumped it in the "recovery" partition, I wouldn't complain and
probably leave it there, but not on the main C: drive.


How easy was life in the days of DOS.


The rest of the time setting up a new machine goes into running
updates, installing various utilities, and general setup. Typical
time is about 3-4 hours elapsed time for a brand new machine. There's
no way I can bill a customer for all that on a new "pre-installed"
machine.


That's what I do and the USB then goes offsite. Brings up a question: How reliable are those USB sticks?


I've seen one or two real failures out of perhaps several hundred in
use. I bought several cheapo packages of three, and had literally all
of them die on me within a few days. I'm not counting the
do-it-thyself user, that plugged the connector from the front panel
USB jack to the motherboard in backwards, and gave every USB device he
owned a reverse battery test. Wiped 2 of mine before I figured it
out. I now carry an LED light, which I use on home build machines.
The only other failures I've seen are from mechanical damage or
immersion. I would say they're quite reliable.

What I tell customers is to get two or more of these and use them
alternately. Typical is 5 of them, labelled Mon thru Fri. The
problem is that they are just too easy to trash the data on them. I
had a virus scanner declare that the Quickboosk QBB data file on one
device was a virus, and try to "fix" it. If it wasn't for the
previous few days backups on other USB memory things, the backup would
have been trashed. I also have the owner or bookkeeper take a full
backup (on DVD) home, just in case of fire, which will melt both the
computah and the backups.


That's roughly what I do. Three rotating sticks, plus one. Only good brands like Sandisk or Lexar.


Western Digital, hmm, that's not good to hear. I have a WDC MyBook LAN drive here and it's purring quietly and reliably for a couple months now. Hopefully it'll continue. They thoroughly botched the USB extender by requiring to connect to some web company they bought, Mionet. Probably some manager had to "justify" that acquisition. <banging head on table>


It's epidemic. I buy the hard disk drives and USB adapter boxes
seperately and build my own. They're not as aesthetic, cool looking,
or aerodynamic as the designer packages, but they work well enough.
You might want to add a sticker on the WD drive with the warranty
expiration date, so that you have a target date to begin worrying.


Hey, don't give me nightmares here ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.

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