OT:Dell computers

[Boaz Bezborodko]

When it comes to computers I prefer to roll my own every 3 or 4 years.  
I had heard that Dell, Gateway, etc. will take a regular motherboard 
from one of the board manufacturers and then start removing stuff to 
reduce the price.  Then my in-law's Dell computer started giving a poor 
signal on the monitor so I figured I'd just put a new graphics adapter 
to replace the on board video.  No joy.  They saved maybe $0.15 by not 
soldering the AGP port onto the motherboard. 

The motherboards bought directly from the manufacturer are better made.  
I had bought a bunch of Asus boards about the same time and not a single 
one failed...Ever.  I still have one computer running on it even though 
it's 11 years old.  The others worked for 7-8 years and are still around 
here and work, but we don't bother using them.  (400MHz PIIs).

For servers I now prefer HP Proliant systems that are 2 generations old 
(like what John's using).  They are well built with tons of redundancy.  
2 power supplies, 2 channels for the SCSI connection, multiple cooling 
fans, backup battery for the SCSI cache, etc.  I hooked it up to an 
array enclosure that can be split to 2 arrays and then set up the drives 
as striped/mirrored with each mirror on a separate array.  Once I lost 
an entire array when a drive went bad and I tried to simply put it back 
in.  (HP tech support had never encountered this before and we never 
could duplicate it.)  The system kept running on the other array without 
missing a beat while I pulled out the drives and put them back in and 
they simply rebuilt themselves.  Haven't had a problem since.

My current system is the one on which I cut my Linux teeth.  (I still 
remember Mark's tongue lashing for my even deigning to ask some basic 
Linux questions on this list.  I'm glad to see that people are a bit 
more tolerant of that now.)  But that was about 3 years ago and I want 
to upgrade to Centos 5 from 4 which isn't supported on this server.  But 
a "new" one is cheap.  (Again, one that is 2 generations old is still 2 
generations ahead of this one.)


> Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:39:21 -0400
> From: "John Esak" <john at valar.com>
> Subject: RE: OT:Dell computers
> To: "'Chris Rendall'" <crendall at teamind.com>,	"'filePro'"
> 	<filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
> Message-ID: <201006300240.o5U2dp0G043167 at admin114.securesites.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
>
>  Have to agree, the HP brand is head and shoulders above the rest. The rack
> mountable jobs like the G4 series are beyond belief as workhorses.
>
> Remember I was ranting about Dale Egan buying a beautiful server for $700.
> Well It works perfectly. He bgrought it to my house... Don't know how the
> hell he carried the ting... It is SO heavy... Anyway, he just bought 5 more!
> At $200 each. Same box and stuff, but no hard drives. This is still an
> amazing deal, since hard drives for this box are in the $30 to $40 range!
> Sheesh, the box and 6 drives still put you at $380!!!!!!!  I feell like
> buying some just to store in my shed for when the world finishes blowing up.
> Another 6 months of Obama and that's a done deal obviously.  People will be
> looking for machines that need no servicing for years and years.    Okay,
> didn't mean to drift with the political aspersion... I'ts hard to keep the
> world and what's happening out of immediate consciousness.  Besides which, I
> just finished The Road To Serfdom.  Good God, and that was written maybe 60
> years ago?  I don't know about most of you, but I'm feeling pretty surfy
> myeself these days. :-)  Actually, when I was a kid, I was pretty surfy, and
> *that* was okay!
>
> John
>