Theoretical PC question

[Martin Brown]

Still have plenty of candles and battery powered emergency lights.

Though the most useful (pre LED era) emergency torch was by 3M using a plastic containing europium doped strontium aluminate. It would quite literally glow in the dark for hours after exposure to sunlight. In midsummer enough light to see by once fully dark adapted until dawn.

Snag for 3M was that few people can imagine total darkness in a sudden power cut since the modern grid has become so reliable. The newer ones cheap nasty Cinese copies pale imitations of their original product.

These days with LEDs you can get almost the same effect by bridging the switch with a high value resistor so that the leakage is enough to make the LED glow very faintly without affecting battery life 10uA is enough.

[Scott]

Thanks. No support it seems for buying a new PC if the purpose is only to meet the W11 specification. I know most components can be replaced but can a motherboard fail and if so can it be replaced or is the motherboard specific to the individual model of computer? I would hate so spend money on components for a machine that is on its way out.

[Martin Brown]

You can replace anything but the effort to do it and cost of parts may make it cheaper to replace it with new or secondhand than repair. It depends how you value your time and how used to working with static sensitive components you are whether it is worth doing. Remember that if the M/b has failed the PSU is probably not far behind or may already have failed at least once. I seem to have spent a lot of time replacing neighbours PC PSU's - which are the first thing to die.

I once had my own PC with flames and sparks coming out of the rear!

Morgan computers have some fairly good deals of secondhand office machines if you don't want something too exotic for gaming.

The only motherboard level repair I have ever done was replacing the dodgy capacitors on boards in the Vista era made with bad fake Chinese (Murata formula) capacitors that blew up after about 3 years.

[wasbit]

Nothing wrong with Vista if you gave it the 4GB RAM that Microsoft originally specified.

[Scott]

Okay, keep a good backup protocol then and run the computer into the ground.

[Sam Block]

Scott [e-mail]> wrote

Yes but with a well obsolete PC its price may not be very useful given that its the main failure with PCs, unlike laptops.

[Sam Block]

Scott [e-mail]> wrote

Yep, just like anything else.

Yes if you can find the same one.

Often.

It usually doesn't make sense with a PC.

[Scott]

Good. Thanks for your advice. I won't buy a new PC unless I need one but I won't throw good money after bad either.

[Martin Brown]

I reckon main PSU is by far the most common failure of modern PC's followed very closely by cooling fans on the CPU and GPU and very occasionally a ram becoming dodgy or appearing to be.

Bad ram PSU capacitors at ~5+ years are another common mode of failure - they swell up and adopt a rakish angle which is a bit of a give away.

I think what he meant was that for certain captive markets that absolutely must have hardware and OS of a certain vintage to operate some (typically scientific instrument or manufacturing) kit you end up in a perverse spiral where you pay over the odds for slower components.

The price performance sweet spot for new build is usually the previous most popular CPU a few months after a new latest and greatest line gets launched. Second hand kit lags somewhat behind but you can easily find former office machines faster than my once cutting edge i7-3770 at Morgans now and very reasonably priced. Until a new CPU offers single threaded performance of 3x more I will stick with what I have now.

[Martin Brown]

I agree that Vista was never as bad as the pundits painted it and would add that Office 2007 launched about the same time was a dog's breakfast and fully deserved all the opprobrium that could be heaped on it.

[soup]

Not my experience at all, have never had a PSU fail (but then have only ever used 'good quality' named brands none of that 'Chinese' rubbish.).

Old adage if the case comes with a PSU the PSU is probably crap

Storage (hard drives ) seem to be the parts with the most failures followed by optical drives (rather uncommon these days) followed by RAM.

Yes case fans and CPU(well heat sinks for same) fans can fail fairly often but they are trivial to replace.

Motherboard is fairly far down the list but you can (sometimes) see the damage, blown caps etc . CPUs themselves hardly ever fail (if installed correctly) .

Still not heard of any reliability problems with SSDs .

To help avoid hard drive failures I go for a slow speed one and mount it well. This takes care of long term seldom accessed storage, whilst the boot disk is a smaller capacity SSD. M2 now .

I have mounted an SSD with double sided tape . As it has no moving parts this is adequate.

Only failures I have encountered on own machines is an Ethernet socket that has bust,(physical damage, son removed Ethernet jack without first undoing clip), and a WiFi card that stopped working, (no idea why but it was cheap enough just to bung another one in).

[Peter Burke]

Peter Able [e-mail] wrote in news:sdptgo$crl$ [e-mail]:

What will eventually catch up with you is the lack of browser updates and the refusal of sites to work with your current one.

[Max Demian]

I've still got candles bought for the 70s power cuts - imported from Germany.

[Max Demian]

Firefox still updates on my W7 (if I let it).

[John Rumm]

There comes a time when an OS too far from the latest becomes a liability. There is also some validity to the argument that more recent OSes dumping "legacy" support can make things run faster and more reliably (so long as you don't need the legacy facilities that were dropped_.

They may work fine, but using 7 now (at least in a business) is a liability. Same goes for other products out of support like Office 2010.

For a home user, the usual problem will be dwindling applications support that gets you in the end. Again you can run old unsupported apps, but then you also run all the associated unpatched critical vulnerabilities. For a machine that never connects to the internet that is fine, otherwise make sure you have a very robust and layered backup system!

No need to be a "junkie", but some upgrades are very worthwhile doing. An older but decently powerful machine for example will get a vast boost in performance swapping its ageing HDD for a SSD.

[John Rumm]

In a regular desktop machine built from off the shelf parts, everything can be replaced. This is not always true of some big brand made desktop machines, where they may have used non standard parts (however even that is less common than it was)

There is however a potential knock on problem, that if you replace a motherboard, you are unlikely to be able to get one that supports your CPU (unless its less than a couple of years old), so you will normally need to replace that at the same time. Chances are you will need to replace the RAM as well. Also watch the PSU requirements - some upgrades might force a change of that!

If you old machine had a floppy drive, don't expect the new motherboard to support that.

You may need to reinstall the OS to get the new MoBo working (actually Win 10 is better than previous versions for this). (with win 10, backup the activation status to a Microsoft account so you can restore it later). Older Windows OSs may be harder to reactivate.

Some may be very much harder to install. For example to install Win 7 on a Intel NUC pc is quite hard work, since the USB controllers are too new to be recognised properly by its installer, hence you lose access to the mouse, kb, and boot device early in the installation! (you need to build a custom "slipstreamed" boot drive with the new drivers pre-loaded to be able to install 7)

[John Rumm]

While all true at the moment, there is no certainty that it will remain so.

Having said that, the proportion of uses that will go to any length to install a new OS themselves is tiny, so they may or may not care to close the workarounds. The most recent comments I saw suggested they may allow older processors than currently stated, but are still holding firm on the other requirements.

[John Rumm]

Generally the motherboard *is" the computer... so for most machines you can fix a replacement relatively easily. There are a number of different sizes and "form factors"[1]. So long as you get one that matches, it will usually be ok.

That works until you get into the "small form factor" machines - those are more bespoke, and replacing parts gets much harder. (motherboard may be custom, and may the PSU. CPU may be a laptop style device soldered to the motherboard. etc.

The two easy fixes for older stuff are more RAM and a SSD, that can make a big difference.

(both my main PCs reside in the same cases that I have been using for more than 25 years, but the machine I am typing on now must be on it's fifth or sixth motherboard, it shares no drives with its original self, and is probably two or three PSUs further on as well).

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Depends on what you will be using it for. I'm happy with windows 7, as I seldom change the software. I do not believe that if you upgrade a 10 or indeed a 7 pc that the file system changes. It may be a choice on a new install. I suspect that the trusted platform thing might well be a big mistake, since not all are going to work MY Pc 2015, is perfectly adequate and fast it has the safe boot disabled but no trusted platform chip though the motherboard has a socket there is no details on what version it supports and until Microsoft actually put out a good reliable test tool I suspect nobody will do very much as its basically Windows 10 blinged up. Brian

[soup]

That is extremely dangerous advice.

I would be tempted to say even if the MoBo physically fits it is still probably not compatible.

First of all check if it 'is for' AMD or Intel processors then check the physical pin layout of the CPU area. Then check it is compatible with the CPU...

There are lots of factors to consider other than the physical fit.

I once ordered a replacement MoBo but it was of a proprietary design, it didn't have a 20+4 power socket (nor the newer six). My own fault, it was quite clearly marked for a specific machine but cost blinded me.