Low end desktop for EE tasks?

[JosephKK]

Joerg [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:

Dell Vostro $349.00
Pad Kra Pow at Thai restaurant $ 10.00
Singha beer at Thai restaurant $ 4.00
Tip $ 3.00
=======
$366.00

No assembly, just click in your order, wait, unpack, set up, start
HD mirror and go to Thai restaurant

To each their own. The build it yourself is a lot better general
desktop box. For your purposes the video card seems to be overkill.
The extra memory really improves performance. And XP home is
unacceptable for anything that might be used as a server of any kind.

 

[Fred Abse]

Guess who told me what really worked: A CPA.

Nice to know they're good for *something* ;-)

 

[Joerg]

Nice to know they're good for *something* ;-)

Mine's pretty good, he is also a tax attorney and they do the taxes for
us every year. But that's not the guy who gave the advice about my
magnesium deficiency. This one can't suffer back pains because he rides
his Harley a lot.

 

[Joerg]

Joerg [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:




To each their own. The build it yourself is a lot better general
desktop box. For your purposes the video card seems to be overkill.
The extra memory really improves performance. And XP home is
unacceptable for anything that might be used as a server of any kind.

It's not going to be a server, there is a little Linux-based drive box
that does that. XP home is fine for CAD and all that, two other PCs have
that here, no complaints other than I'd rather have Win2K.

Video is always overkill for me, I rarely go over 600*800. Eyes don't
become younger. I'll see if it already has two VGA outputs. If not I may
put another cheap graphics card in there and rig up a 2nd monitor to
write the module specs on while drawing schematics. Right now that's
done on a 2nd PC.

 

[[email protected]]

[email protected] hath wroth:


Ok, just make sure you backup ALL the data. The only way to test that
is to do a dry run on a new machine. If you're paranoid, you might
want to convince IT that it's time for a fire drill. For what it's
worth, I've done that a few times at several of my customers, with not
very good results. There's ALWAYS something that just doesn't seem to
get backed up. For example, the Quickbooks data backup and restore I
previously mentioned successfully restored the data and the company
settings, but not the program preferences and appearance. There are
also chronic problems with open files not being backed up. It's
repeated failures to restore from data only and incremental backups
that inspired me to use image backups. However, the real reason was
speed. Image backups and restores are considerably faster than file
by file. Much less HD head motion involved. Time to recovery is
important.


I know where that came from. There was an article several years ago
allegedly by an IBM researcher proclaiming that DVD's were not
suitable for archival storage because of the limited lifetime of the
dyes involved. I won't go into the merits of the claims, but the
result has been some rather inflated claims of extended lifetime and
"archival quality" media, with correspondingly inflated prices. I've
done my own UV fade testing and found that I could kill a DVD+R if I
left it in the sun (on my office roof) for about 3 months. The DVD-R
and DVD+RW disks went for 5 months before I gave up (when the HVAC
repairman threw away my test disks). Anyway, find a better excuse to
not do backups.

--
Jeff Liebermann [email protected]
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

Actually, where it came from was I put my photos from a South Lake
Tahoe hiking trip onto DVD-RW, and then kept the DVD-RW in my
backpack. When I went to a meeting in Ontario, one of my co-workers
wanted to see the pictures. Some of the pictures refused to load -
some had white noise on the bottom half. That seriously killed my
confidence in DVD-RWs as backups.

Daily 7za / tar / sha1sum backups to a network drive it is.

And, for what it's worth, I'm a chemical engineer working for the
State.

M

 

[JosephKK]

Joerg [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:

It's not going to be a server, there is a little Linux-based drive
box that does that. XP home is fine for CAD and all that, two other
PCs have that here, no complaints other than I'd rather have Win2K.

Video is always overkill for me, I rarely go over 600*800. Eyes
don't become younger. I'll see if it already has two VGA outputs. If
not I may put another cheap graphics card in there and rig up a 2nd
monitor to write the module specs on while drawing schematics. Right
now that's done on a 2nd PC.

I usually have medium to good video. My eyes are getting older as
well, but it is expressed in loss of close focus, not resolution
loss. Thus, i really love my 22 inch widescreen 1680 by 1050 LCD.

 

[Fred Abse]

My eyes are getting older as well,
but it is expressed in loss of close focus, not resolution loss.

Around age 40, you start to notice that your arms are getting shorter ;-)

 

[Joerg]

Mine don't have resolution loss either but I get tired faster when fonts
are small.

Around age 40, you start to notice that your arms are getting shorter ;-)

Nope. It's just that the matter moves to other regions, usually lays
itself around the belly as a ring. IOW we grow sideways instead of longer.

 

[JosephKK]

Fred Abse [email protected] posted to
sci.electronics.design:

Around age 40, you start to notice that your arms are getting
shorter ;-)

My experience has been different than yours, i seem to be buying even
longer sleeves than in my youth.