OT Building new computer (DIY)

[clare]

And remember the price of the 1.44 drives when they first came out?????

Add the price of 8kbX1 ram chips???

[clare]

Just need to rember black and blue are different. TOP LINE drives from any manufacturer are generally pretty decent. "consumer grade" stuff from pretty well any manufacturer is pretty dicey.

[clare]

The MPG series. For several years I sold hundreds of Fujitsu drives, and they ROCKED. Excellent speed, and a failure rate below single digits percentage-wize. Then the built a plant in Thailand and put part of the operating firmware on the platter - and it all went to hell in a handbasket. The first 30 MPG drives I sold, 29 died before the first year was up. About half were replaced under warranty and failed again before the warranty expired - by which time they had stopped building desktop hard-drives and just started paying full refunds so you could replace with whatever you wanted that was available. I THINK there is still ONE of those MPG drives still in opperation somewhere.

Pretty well killed Fujitsu in the hard drive and computer market.

[Dan Espen]

Agreed.

Provided you define HELL as pretty damned nice.

Back in the 70s when I first encountered UNIX at Bell Labs it was a massive improvement over the mainframes I'd used before.

Back in the 80s when I used Solaris, with a GUI and all, pretty damned nice.

Back in the 90s when I got my first Linux distribution installed, I did have to patch the ethernet driver and later a video driver, but it was still damned nice.

So the issue in front of me is 10 years ago, was UNIX hell? Well that would be 2002. Unix (Linux in particular) worked well for me.

Since then it's only gotten better.

[clare]

Has so far on the first 12. I did need to downgrade from 64 bit to 32 bit so we could continue using the fi4120 scanners - and had fun finding the correct vista 32 bit driver to give the functionality we needed.

Other than that, great. Six have been running for several months now - got 10 more last week. Six of them up and running.

[clare]

And XP blew vista away- - - -

[clare]

Not a good choice for anything but virtual reality gaming, in my opinion. And then only if you are replacing your machine every year - which is about par for the course with high end gamers.

[clare]

A PROPER cleanup of the system files/registry, and removal of the crapware you don't need, tames them right down.

[The Daring Dufas]

I work on lots of computers and the drives that I had the most problems with were some horror story clones of Seagate that came out of India. Perhaps you didn't grok what I meant, my fault. I should have written "My personal hard drives." It's been quite a while since I had one of my own hard drives fail. We've had some out of box failures of voice mail system hard drives lately and I replace drives in servers and point of sale systems all the time but I find those computers plugged up with dirt which I believe leads to the failure of most computer systems. ^_^

PS, Some of my hard drives are still working after 10 years but they're not hammered 24/7. ^_^

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

The worst drives I ever bought/sold were clones of Seagate made in India. I haven't seen one in years so I suppose the manufacturer is not around anymore. O_o

TDD

[clare]

Yeah, time goes fast for us old guys. Change 10 to 20 or 25. Every version of Unix or Xenix had it's own quirks.

Once you learned all the quirky syntax you could make it sit up and dance. If you didn't, you couldn't get it to do anything.

[The Daring Dufas]

But it's fun to me, I like a challenge unless a customer is breathing down my neck. ^_^

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

I used to carry a 20lb Co2 cylinder with a blow gun attached to blow the dirt out of customer's computers but I'd take them outside first. ^_^

TDD

[clare]

I've had plenty fail in boxes you could eat out of - but heat definitely makes it worse - and dirt makes heat worse.

On laptops, people actually using them "on their lap" does cause them to run hot, in many cases. So does sitting on a desk with a loose sheet of paper sucked up onto the air intake - - - - - -

[clare]

Likewise - Don't know if I have the "patience of Job" or if I'm "just too dumb to know when I'm licked"

[The Daring Dufas]

If it's my own on my own time, I tend to view it as entertainment but when the clock is ticking for someone else, I must decide if it's economical to repair. I've had to point out to a number of folks over the years that the most expensive and valuable item in/on their computer is "The Data/Information". I used to preach "Backup your data and put the tape in the fire resistant safe." but with the advent of cheap web based backup that can be automated there is no excuse for any business to ever lose data. I run service as an independent contractor for a few nationwide service organizations where they will ship overnight loaded hard drives to replace those in retail store computer systems and of course I've repeatedly asked them about preventative maintenance to clean the dust wildlife out of the computers on a regular basis but for some odd reason they don't want to do anything until it breaks. O_o

TDD

[krw]

Mine won't update the WiFi stuff and I agree with gfretwell, Lenovo has gone way downhill. I don't know what's better, though. I haven't been impressed with any I've seen lately.

[Guv Bob]

is better for me than searching a website. You can view them online = also at

-- click at the top on "See our ads".

Sounds good. In that case, maybe the recycler.com or ebay might be a = possibility? I still have the first laptop I bought with Win95 on it = and it still works fine for the applications I installed on it. Also = have W98SE, 2000, ME and XT on machines, all running fast and fine for = what they were intended.

I'm a firm believer of picking the application first and then seeing if = I need to upgrade OS or hardware. I still have one of the original = system-builder DVDs of Windows 7 that I got as a Frys loss leader. = Never have installed because I still have not needed to upgrade yet.

[clare]

Still have my RS CoCo2 withJ-Dos and dual floppies, as well as my MN-10. Anyone remember that little gem???