O/T: Need To Build A Puter

IAWTP... you ARE full of it. Back to running three personas in the single newsgroup are we dWeebTVer?

Get to behaving yourself Gym Bob/Benji/Josepi/Janice or I get busy. You choose. george

Reply to
George Watson
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Except when they don't.

Which doesn't mean that the automatic assignment actually uses them.

Reply to
J. Clarke

Christ, my students used to be able to tear one down and reassemble it in 4 hours.

Reply to
J. Clarke

This hasn't really been a problem since 1995. Once PCI superceded ISA/EISA/MCA as a bus architecture, and ACPI came along as a standard mechanism for the BIOS to convey confguration information to the operating system, hardware has truely become plug and play. PCI (& PCI-X) only had 4 defined interrupts (per PCI bridge) orignally anyway; until MSI and MSI-X came along. With PCIe (PCI-Express), multiple PCI root complexes and MSI-X, there are effectively more physical interrupt vectors available on the I/O side than the processor can handle (the x86 processors are limited to 256 entries in the interrupt vector table).

That's not to say that particular operating systems (such as win2k or xp) don't have driver conflict issues - but that's not a hardware problem.

scott

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

My lab guy routinely does it in 30 minutes. 15 minutes to swap out a power supply, mobo or processor. 5 minutes to swap out dimms (most of that removing/attaching cables so the system will slide out of the rack). There are currently about 300 1U and 2U boxes in the lab (all servers); including one that has 192 cores, 1 TB DRAM and 100TB disk.

But he's been building mainframes, large MPP machines, small unix boxes, servers and PC's for 30 years.

scott

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

It will be longer, remember you had a new mother board replaced a couple of years ago.

Reply to
Leon

Damn! ... forgot. Wonder if I have any shells left ...

Reply to
Swingman

That's EXACTLY why is doesn't normally seem to work that way. Computer forums are littered with "large and small annoying problems".

Lots of folks give there systems specs in detail at NewEgg (in their product reviews) and in other forums. You might wish to consider duplicating a successful system that appears consistent with your needs. You'll still get all the excitement that comes with starting the system the first time.

BTW, my dad gave me a "pick-up" tool alot like this one:

formatting link
end of mind doesn't have as much girth, but you get the idea. In my mind, it's a must! :) You put a screw in its patented grip, and the long handle permits you to start threading the screws holding the mainboard to the case while you are eating a sandwich with your other hand. In the remote (very) chance you drop a screw, the tools may help you recover it. You said you've already built before so please excuse me if this is redundant information.

Bill

Reply to
Bill

Except when they don't.

Which doesn't mean that the automatic assignment actually uses them.

=================

My Win 7 o/s shows up to 190 IRQs assigned on different devices and processes.

I would image this is an 8 bit value resulting in 256 unique IRQ handler vectors auto selected by independent hardware IRQ multiplexer.

I haven't had a problem with IRQs for the last 15 years or more. Things have definitely changed since I wrote assembler code for 8 bit and 16 bit CPUs!

Reply to
Eric

My lab guy routinely does it in 30 minutes. 15 minutes to swap out a power supply, mobo or processor. 5 minutes to swap out dimms (most of that removing/attaching cables so the system will slide out of the rack). There are currently about 300 1U and 2U boxes in the lab (all servers); including one that has 192 cores, 1 TB DRAM and 100TB disk.

But he's been building mainframes, large MPP machines, small unix boxes, servers and PC's for 30 years.

scott

=======

I can take a baseball bat to an acting up old system in less than 5 seconds.

Reply to
Eric

I believe you just won the pissing contest.

Reply to
Leon

DELL -- Doesn't Ever Last Long

They wanted about four hundred and sixty bucks for a new motherboard (and it would probably have been a refurb). Hell, they wanted sixty bucks just to talk to a service tech on the phone to figure out what was wrong. It's the only PC I've ever owned that died due to a parts failure that I couldn't fix, it was their top-of-the-line model too. I'll never buy another DELL.

Reply to
DGDevin

Half an hour sounds about right for an experienced builder.

Reply to
J. Clarke

Yeah, what he said!

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Except when they don't.

Which doesn't mean that the automatic assignment actually uses them.

Reply to
m II

Speaking of comprehension problems!!

It was a typo. The OP wants a new "puter" to use on the golf green this summer.

Having all carefully selected parts in front of me (last two computers I labored over parts for a month), I can indeed get one together in an eight hour period.

Might I

that don't read and understand the written language? Ones that might jump to conclusions based on their own arrogance?

With little doubt, I would say that anyone that did not select their parts beforehand is an idiot. Was that your assumption, even though it was never expressed, written, or alluded to in any way by me?

With all selected parts in hand, my computer guy can put a machine together in a couple of hours, install the OS, and run all his diagnostic software in a couple of more. He can have a new machine out the door in 4 - 5 hours, but her prefers overnight self diagnostics. He has done it for me and my business associates many, many times as he does it all day long. The diagnostics run far longer than the assembly time from him.

As I said, for me, it would take a full day (if all assembly went right and there were no DOA parts.)

It appears, your mileage may vary.

Robert

Reply to
m II

Classic moronic faker. You can't install the O/S in half an hour.

Crikey! My mom could lick your dad with his hands tied behind his back and a blindfold on.

Reply to
m II

I have a similar experience

I've been patiently waiting for Dell to produce drivers that work with my six year old laptop. Their Indian BS tech help installed the wrong drivers, as substitutes when the thing was a month old and it has never worked properly since. The proper drivers have never become available as far as any tech helper can find. The LCD screen is installed upside down so you have to almost close the lid to see the two levels upgrade screen to display clearly.

After shipping to repair in the box they sent me they sent it back loose and told me they didn't authorize any repairs. It sat in some shipping depot for three months, lost until I produced tracking numbers.

Dell! Never again.

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(that oughta do it)

Reply to
m II

All sounds good except for one thing. By the time somebody posts a review of the parts they assembled the MoBo has revisions made to it.

Most is pot luck but going by reputation of the labelled manufacturers is a good idea for the best pot luck.

-----------------

Lots of folks give there systems specs in detail at NewEgg (in their product reviews) and in other forums. You might wish to consider duplicating a successful system that appears consistent with your needs. You'll still get all the excitement that comes with starting the system the first time.

BTW, my dad gave me a "pick-up" tool alot like this one:

formatting link
end of mind doesn't have as much girth, but you get the idea. In my mind, it's a must! :) You put a screw in its patented grip, and the long handle permits you to start threading the screws holding the mainboard to the case while you are eating a sandwich with your other hand. In the remote (very) chance you drop a screw, the tools may help you recover it. You said you've already built before so please excuse me if this is redundant information.

Bill

Reply to
m II

I beg to differ. In our lab, we use PXE to install the system, and it gets installed with our hypervisor and control domain (a linux OS).

The BIOS is configured to boot from the network, our DHCP server points the BIOS to a host configured with a /tftpboot directory containing the install image for the O/S and the BIOS downloads the kernel and initial RAMdisk image from the /tftpboot directory on the boot server and executes it. From there, it's just like a standard CDROM install, except it uses NFS to access the distribution over gigabit ethernet.

The entire install takes exactly 3 minutes and 15 seconds[*]. Trust me, I do this dozens of times a day when testing changes to the hypervisor.

Interactive Windows may be a different story, but your claim that an O/S can't be installed in 30 minutes is shown to be incorrect. For Windows, you can Ghost an image in under 10 minutes from a golden master, and we have a product called Power Cockpit that does unattended windows installs over the network configuring the registry automatically per site template; I don't recall how long a windows provision takes, but it is certainly much less than 30 minutes.

An interactive redhat/centos 5.5 install takes about 16 minutes from CDROM, depending on hard disk speed (15kRPM SCSI or SSD will install in less than 10 minutes).

scott

[*] 2 minutes 4 seconds when the system has SSD instead of rotating media.
Reply to
Scott Lurndal

What system would he use to build his ghost image? It would take him a day to create a temporary system to make the ghost image, then he would have to tear it apart and send it back to the seller.

None of that applies to a unique one of a kind, stand alone user system build, as the faker was referring to.

I used to use O/S systems that fit on a FDD too. Over 100K was big then. Once Linux grows up it will compete with the User system O/Ses. Until then mark it with a Red Hat, Alberta symbol and keep it for control systems and servers that don't like Users, expecting the O/S to work for them instead of them adapting to the O/S.

LOL

The BIOS is configured to boot from the network, our DHCP server points the BIOS to a host configured with a /tftpboot directory containing the install image for the O/S and the BIOS downloads the kernel and initial RAMdisk image from the /tftpboot directory on the boot server and executes it. From there, it's just like a standard CDROM install, except it uses NFS to access the distribution over gigabit ethernet.

The entire install takes exactly 3 minutes and 15 seconds[*]. Trust me, I do this dozens of times a day when testing changes to the hypervisor.

Interactive Windows may be a different story, but your claim that an O/S can't be installed in 30 minutes is shown to be incorrect. For Windows, you can Ghost an image in under 10 minutes from a golden master, and we have a product called Power Cockpit that does unattended windows installs over the network configuring the registry automatically per site template; I don't recall how long a windows provision takes, but it is certainly much less than 30 minutes.

An interactive redhat/centos 5.5 install takes about 16 minutes from CDROM, depending on hard disk speed (15kRPM SCSI or SSD will install in less than

10 minutes).

scott

[*] 2 minutes 4 seconds when the system has SSD instead of rotating media.
Reply to
m II

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