Low end desktop for EE tasks?

[John Larkin]

Yeah, but you're a leprechaun. Not all of us have a pot of gold to dip
into. )-;

But every time a PC dies, it's going to take some number of days to
get a new one, or repair the old one. If you lose the c: drive, you've
got to reinstall all your apps, projects, tools, email, network stuff,
and Windows settings (which will never be quite the same.) And maybe
spend an hour on the phone with Microsoft convincing them that you
really did just replace the motherboard. If you're an engineer, not
even a leprechaun, that time is worth a whole lot more than a few
hundred dollars.

I figure that one design engineer should design about a million
dollars worth of stuff every year. That is, a man-year of product
design should sell a million dollars worth of stuff over the product
lifetimes. That's $4000 per working day. So why have him mess with
crap PCs? Or sit in a bad chair? Or use flaky test equipment?

John

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

Yeah, but you're a leprechaun. Not all of us have a pot of gold to dip
into. )-;

Thanks,
Rich

His entire budget really doesn't cover a good video card for CAD. It's
funny-- on one machine I'm using at a client, on-site I can use it for
hours with the video card fan running at minimum speed running Excel,
Word, Visio, Firefox, etc. As soon as I open up a CAD 3D assembly
model, it starts to blast almost instantly. BTW, the HP xw4400 looks
like a decent off-the-shelf machine but it exceeds the budget by +6db.

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

 

[Joerg]

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.




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.

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 ;-)

 

[Joerg]

I bought 7 MyBooks (USB/FIrewire version) this fall. 3 smoked
(literally) as soon as they were plugged in. I'm not impressed.

Ouch. This one is the "World" edition on a LAN connection. Plugged it
in, booted up on its own, works. Only that Mionet software was a pain in
the neck.

 

[Nico Coesel]

Actually, I've had more problems buying from Dell and the various Dell
refurbished online stores, than from either eBay or Cragislist.
<http://www.delloutlet.com>
<http://www.dfsdirectsales.com>



Good plan. I use two mirrored file servers and/or NAS (network
attached storage) boxes. I don't just backup the work. I do image
backups of the entire hard disk so that the effort necessary to
restore Humpty Dumpty is much less than the mess produced by
overlapping incremental or partial backups. Think of backup in terms
of how long will it take to get you back to normal operation. It's
often much longer than you would initially suspect.

That depends on your setup. I have a spare PC and daily backups. If my
PC fails (which happened a few months ago) I fire up the spare PC and
pull the projects I need from the backups. It takes less than half an
hour to get up & running.

 

[qrk]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:37:33 -0700, Joerg

Somehow my eyes can't get used to them. A few hours of Gerber reviewing
and they hurt. Not with the large Trinitron tube here.

I find that many people don't adjust the brightness/contrast of their
shiny new LCD monitors and end up getting headaches. After I go in and
dim down the monitor, they feel much better. Some LCD monitors have
problems dimming down because they are crap, like my Samsung monitor
at home. I think this Samsung is meant for a really bright office or
out doors. The Neovos and Viewsonic monitors at work adjust quite
nicely. Also, using the digital video output makes a difference in
sharpness. My only complaint about LCD monitors is early failure of
the power supply capacitors. They tend to use those bogus Taiwan
electrolytics that last a year or two. I've seen this in a Viewsonic
(mains cap) and two Sceptre (many sw. pwr supply caps) monitors.

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"Frithiof Andreas Jensen"


And a crash every hour.

So!? It goes back in the shop, they fix it, repeat as needed. That's why one
always buys the assembly: to trigger the mandatory 2 year warranty!!

There is a reason why Dell and Compaq are more
expensive: quality!

Nope - It's their reject rates! Just deselect the on-site maintenance plan
and the crapware package and 1/3 of the price goes away (at least here in
the DK)!

Now we are into lapdogs: My brand new corprat Dell lattitude D620 has just
about 1 hour in the puny battery it comes with, hibernate does not work and
when it tries a system modal dialog comes up which (of course) lights up the
CPU+Graphics so that 40 minutes later when I get home and open the bag the
case is about 60 C and the CPU clocked down to maybe 25 kHz! Crap I.O.W!!

The old corprat HP *worked* at least - While wifey's Toshiba Sattelite runs
flawlessly. And .... That was cheaper than the Dell, the battery last for
4.5 hours and power management even works also.

If you want nice brandname kit, Toshiba is it for laptops; HP is for
stationary HW.

And Compaq .... Never liked them since they began shipping PC's loaded with
Compaq crapware designed to corrupt Windows and frustrate any attempts in
upgrading the OS due to missing drivers. Then daugther smoked one by
sticking two CD's in the drive at the same time - so much for error margins
;-p (But since it is Expensive I got two new, better, boxes off the
insurance money ;-)

At work they bought 5 Acer PC's

Dell sell their rejects to Acer who rebadge them ;-)

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

Joerg wrote:

I *have* witnessed your environmental-impact awareness.

The new Athlon/Pentium CPU's will throttle right down to 6-15 W.

 

[Joerg]

But every time a PC dies, it's going to take some number of days to
get a new one, or repair the old one. If you lose the c: drive, you've
got to reinstall all your apps, projects, tools, email, network stuff,
and Windows settings (which will never be quite the same.) And maybe
spend an hour on the phone with Microsoft convincing them that you
really did just replace the motherboard. If you're an engineer, not
even a leprechaun, that time is worth a whole lot more than a few
hundred dollars.

I figure that one design engineer should design about a million
dollars worth of stuff every year. That is, a man-year of product
design should sell a million dollars worth of stuff over the product
lifetimes. That's $4000 per working day. So why have him mess with
crap PCs? Or sit in a bad chair? Or use flaky test equipment?

Ok, ok, I upped it to Pentium dual-core and 2GB RAM. Big enough?

They even threw in nagware removal at the factory so I should be
productive in a jiffy. What was really nice is that after the confirm
email didn't show and I called Dell they re-sent it plus threw in
overnight shipping for free. For my troubles (wasn't any trouble). Cool.

Sometimes emails seem to disappear in black holes lately. Heard that
from many people. The weirdest: A cell phone message. It came 1-1/2
weeks late ...

 

[Joerg]

His entire budget really doesn't cover a good video card for CAD. It's
funny-- on one machine I'm using at a client, on-site I can use it for
hours with the video card fan running at minimum speed running Excel,
Word, Visio, Firefox, etc. As soon as I open up a CAD 3D assembly
model, it starts to blast almost instantly. BTW, the HP xw4400 looks
like a decent off-the-shelf machine but it exceeds the budget by +6db.

The Dell Vostro series? It's a Intel GMA3100 based board. Supposedly
also dual-monitor capable. Hey, maybe I'll try that when it's here. What
more should I want?

The monitor here can do amazing graphics. However, after going over the
hill my eyes can't tolerate super-duper-hi-res nano-sized pixels
anymore. They get tired from that. I've seen more and more people
ratchet down their screen resolutions because they found out the same
thing. Well, maybe it's because us analog dudes do get old :-(

 

[Joel Kolstad]

I've seen more and more people ratchet down their screen resolutions because
they found out the same thing.

I'm surprised that people seem to crank down the resolution prior to just
increasing the system font size. If your eyes are really bad, I suppose
changing the resolution is the only option, but just making the fonts biggers
tend to let you keep more usable screen real estate because you don't need to
"read" all the window "decorations" (scroll bars, minimize/maximize/close
buttons, resize handle, etc.) -- just hit them with the mouse.

Well, maybe it's because us analog dudes do get old :-(

Would you like a nice Viewsonic PF795 CRT to try out a dual-monitor setup on?
(See:
http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-PF795-Perfectly-Flat-Monitor/dp/B00004Y7LC) --
I kept it even after selling my P815 ($1300 new, sold for $20 to a student!),
as while the P815 was 21" the maximum supported resolution was lower and the
screen wasn't flat. It's probably not worth shipping but I might be driving
down through your part of the country in about four weeks.

---Joel

 

[Joerg]

I'm surprised that people seem to crank down the resolution prior to just
increasing the system font size. If your eyes are really bad, I suppose
changing the resolution is the only option, but just making the fonts biggers
tend to let you keep more usable screen real estate because you don't need to
"read" all the window "decorations" (scroll bars, minimize/maximize/close
buttons, resize handle, etc.) -- just hit them with the mouse.

It's more for CAD. The drawing itself can be zoomed to anything but many
programs size their menues according to the resolution and often you
can't alter the fonts.

The eyes are still ok but I started needing glasses for PC work about
five years ago. 1.5x for CAD and SMT down to 0805, 2.5x for 0402 and
stuff. I don't know what it is but at a medium resolution my eyes are
less tired after really long sessions. And they are also less tired if I
use a real CRT monitor.

Would you like a nice Viewsonic PF795 CRT to try out a dual-monitor setup on?
(See:
http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-PF795-Perfectly-Flat-Monitor/dp/B00004Y7LC) --

Thanks, but I have a nice 2nd monitor, a Viewsonic. It became
semi-retired when I replaced the desktop in my lab with a laptop. Clogs
up shelf space in my walk-in closet so my wife would really like it to
disappear from there.

The main CAD screen here is a P1130. Huge, flat screen, nice.

I kept it even after selling my P815 ($1300 new, sold for $20 to a student!),
as while the P815 was 21" the maximum supported resolution was lower and the
screen wasn't flat. It's probably not worth shipping but I might be driving
down through your part of the country in about four weeks.

Maybe we could have a beer Although, chances are I might be working
in the East Bay then.

 

[John Larkin]

It's more for CAD. The drawing itself can be zoomed to anything but many
programs size their menues according to the resolution and often you
can't alter the fonts.

The eyes are still ok but I started needing glasses for PC work about
five years ago. 1.5x for CAD and SMT down to 0805, 2.5x for 0402 and
stuff. I don't know what it is but at a medium resolution my eyes are
less tired after really long sessions. And they are also less tired if I
use a real CRT monitor.



Thanks, but I have a nice 2nd monitor, a Viewsonic. It became
semi-retired when I replaced the desktop in my lab with a laptop. Clogs
up shelf space in my walk-in closet so my wife would really like it to
disappear from there.

The main CAD screen here is a P1130. Huge, flat screen, nice.



Maybe we could have a beer Although, chances are I might be working
in the East Bay then.

Rumor suggests that there may be beer in San Francisco, too.

John

 

[marika]

Joerg wrote in message ...

Hosed it all off in a large sink, let dry in the
sun, works again! Except for one key but it ain't an important one.

This explains Big Al's likely fixation with Al-aska

In addition to dropping sardines in miracle whip and peanut butter on date nut bread on his keyboard like daily while he writes me
retarded emails

He's also allergic to water he says.

I am NOT making this up

mk5000


-----Original Message-----
From: marika <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.usenet.legends.lester-mosley,alt.radio.whadya-know
Date: Sunday, September 16, 2007 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: UCF physicist says Hollywood movies hurt students' understanding of science

 

[Joerg]

Rumor suggests that there may be beer in San Francisco, too.

Anchor Steam, the good stuff! Would be a nice opportunity to have one.
If they let me out of the dungeon ...

 

[[email protected]]

"Frithiof Andreas Jensen"




And a crash every hour. There is a reason why Dell and Compaq are more
expensive: quality! At work they bought 5 Acer PC's (against my
recommendation). It took 3/4 day (average) for each machine to get it
up and running and Acer had to come over 4 times to fix 2 machines.

I have two AMD 64 boxes. I don't recall when I booted the suse box
last. My X64 box needs booting, but only becasue of a virus update. [I
just don't get why all these windows programs require booting.]

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

The Dell Vostro series? It's a Intel GMA3100 based board. Supposedly
also dual-monitor capable. Hey, maybe I'll try that when it's here. What
more should I want?

OpenGL hardware acceleration?

The monitor here can do amazing graphics. However, after going over the
hill my eyes can't tolerate super-duper-hi-res nano-sized pixels
anymore. They get tired from that. I've seen more and more people
ratchet down their screen resolutions because they found out the same
thing. Well, maybe it's because us analog dudes do get old :-(

Almost all LCD monitors have pixel sizes between 0.25mm and 0.3mm.
That's only a +/-10% range in linear dimensions.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

 

[Mick]

The Dell Vostro series? It's a Intel GMA3100 based board. Supposedly
also dual-monitor capable. Hey, maybe I'll try that when it's here. What
more should I want?

The monitor here can do amazing graphics. However, after going over the
hill my eyes can't tolerate super-duper-hi-res nano-sized pixels
anymore. They get tired from that. I've seen more and more people
ratchet down their screen resolutions because they found out the same
thing. Well, maybe it's because us analog dudes do get old :-(

Go to the chemlst and get some good suppllments for your eyes. Bought
some the other day at the chemlst.
Mlck C
Stlll looklng for sfa
oh yea and l do need a new kb, plty lts a laptop.

 

[[email protected]]

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.

I've heard it was bad but I had no idea it was that bad.

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.


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.


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.


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.

Ah. We're kind of limited in what we can do at work - we're not free
to install backup software for instance. The IT folks don't do any
backups for us besides backing up the network drive, and working
directly from the network drive is SLOW. (There was some sort of bug
in Windows XP that made network access super-slow... I discovered the
bug through some web research, and told the IT folks the fix [THAT in
and of itself should raise a few eyebrows] - it involves going to
Device Manager and setting the network card Speed and Duplex to 100Mb
Full instead of Auto) but it's still slow. I work off the C: drive
and keep all my files in the C:\Files folder, which makes zipping
really easy. (I close all programs before leaving the office, so open
files aren't a problem.) I create the zip file on my C: drive then
shuffle it over to the file server.

At home I take it a step further - run tar backups and run a sha1sum
on that before and after transferring.

I ran a few tests and was always able to get what I wanted, so I'm not
worried.

Michael
www.acomputerexpert.com (my side business, after work)

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

[email protected] (Nico Coesel) hath wroth:

That depends on your setup. I have a spare PC and daily backups. If my
PC fails (which happened a few months ago) I fire up the spare PC and
pull the projects I need from the backups. It takes less than half an
hour to get up & running.

Maybe. Just one problem. It takes more than twice as much work to
keep two machines in sync. Between Windoze updates, application
updates, software license issues, and minor configuration differences,
the two machines are guaranteed to diverge. I own a fair number of
functional machines. Among those that I use regularly, there are 2
desktops, 1 server, 2 laptops, and a PDA phone. I synchronize the
address books, bookmarks, billing info, and several active projects
between most of these machines. It works for me because I actively
use all these machines at least once per day. If your backup machine
is sitting around collecting dust, while waiting for a PC failure,
methinks it will take more than a half hour to get it up to date and
usable.