I disagree. Nowadays, people are holding onto their computers for a lot longer than they used to. It used to be that a 3-5 year old computer was slow compared the latest and greatest, and trying to upgrade it was mostly pointless because the technology had moved on. Now, that 3-5 year old computer is still pretty good, and for the most part does what you want need it do just fine - but it would be nice if it would have a bit more memory, or a bigger drive, or maybe a DVI port so it can drive a big monitor, or maybe USB2 or Firewire ports. That kind of thing is fairly cheap, so people upgrade the machine as they see it's worthwhile to spend a few bucks on "that old computer" because they don't feel the machine is obsolete yet.
Also, you might want to keep in mind that those expansion slots may not be needed now, but they could be very useful later. For example, I knew some people who were pissed at Apple when they dropped Firewire support on the iPod and they had an iMac without USB2. $20 to fix that problem on the PC, and $1500 to fix that problem on the Apple.
A lot of motherboards aimed at the DIY crowd are overclocked slightly from the factory. Probably so they look better on the plots the hardware review sites like to make that make a 3% difference in performance look absolutely huge. 1% is a bit on the high end, but 0.5% is pretty common. Interestingly, most OEM machines seem to be unclocked slightly, I'm not sure why they do that but almost every one I've seen is usually underclocked 0.25-0.5%.
If the computer I'm trying to diagnose has more than one memory stick (thanks to dual-channel, that's almost always the case nowadays), I always swap them around and see if the errors follow the location of the stick or not. It helps to disable dual-channel in the BIOS or arrange the memory sticks in such a way that dual channel won't work so you know which one is testing bad. That way I can make a better guess as to whether the memory is bad or something else with the computer. I figured that was something everyone did. It also helps to have another working computer handy that accepts the same type of memory too.
Most colleges blacklist any unknown MAC address, and to connect to the network, you need to go through some kind of process that ties your MAC to your login. So in other words, simply changing your MAC address randomly to something else wouldn't work, but changing it to another already authorized MAC address worked as you would expect.
I'm not so sure of that. How many places exist where you have a choice between Comcast and Charter? Comcast computes against the local phone company, satellite, and FIOS (where available), not Charter.
The ruling class is almost always conservative. They're on the top after all, and so long as there isn't a threat to their status, they're not going to go around and change things willy-nilly just because (which is more of a liberal thing). Remember, it was a so-called conserative who started the TARP program in the first place.
It's not that other equipment is more reliable. It's just that I'm not going to pay a price premium for equipment no more reliable than stuff I can pick up cheaper.
Also, anyone who tries to a server off of an Xbox360 gets what they deserve.
The article actually states in reference to commodity drives: "There turned out to be surprisingly little hard information about this, with some people having replaced an ADM's drive with no trouble and others experiencing performance or reliability issues."
Command.com still exists on Windows XP. Try it. It's all there in all it's 8.3 filename goodness. I'm not sure exactly what it is there for, except maybe to be backwards compatible with some really old DOS stuff.
You have to move your fingers a lot less with Dvorak rather than Qwerty, which is one of the main ways it gets its speed advantage. You don't need a study for that, it's common sense.
That's probably because there are very few boards at Newegg that can accept 192GB of ram. And they are very expensive.
Now the base Mac Pro is basically a pretty case, $300 Core i7 processor, a crippled motherboard that only accepts up to 8GB of ram, and outdated graphics for a whopping $2500. It's not hard to do better than that at Newegg, hence the reason why people ripped it apart.
Well, it was more like the Internet blew up, and Windows 95 was just along for the ride. It caught Bill Gates by surprise just like many other people. Though the nice thing about Windows 95 is that you could pretty much connect it to a network (or dial up into one) and it would pretty much just work. Getting Windows 3.1 onto a network could be a pretty big pain.
Some PCs leave the USB bus powered up when "off". My homebuilt PC is like this (I have it hooked to a power strip to kill it when off). I'm not sure why they do this - I've seen some that allow you to turn on PC from the USB keyboard which would require this, and others power the PS/2 ports for the same reason. Some also power the PCI bus, presumably for network cards that use wake-on-lan (I've seen this on some Dells, it may be a propriety thing as all my homebuilt PCs didn't do this and required that little 3-wire cable). Others with onboard network power the networking hardware for the same reason.
My advice would be to go into the Bios and disable the wake-on-lan, and disable powering on the PC with the keyboard/mouse. This may help, but I've seen computers that still draw power even with that stuff disabled for no apparent reason.
But it gets even worse. The heat cycles of computers heating up when in use and cooling down when powered off will take a small toll on the life of the computer.
Leaving the computer on all the time also takes its toll on the computer. Items with moving parts like the harddrives and fans wear out. The computer will clog up with dust faster. Electrolytic capacitors will not last as long. Power spikes and brownouts that happen when the computer would otherwise be off will shorten the life of the power supply and other components.
It's my experience that leaving a computer on all the time will result in more motherboard (capacitor), fan and power supply failures. This will be worse if you don't dust the computer out regularly. Optical and floppy drives will clog up with dust and not work when you need them. The harddrives will not last as long, and they are more likely to go without warning as a harddrive that is starting to fail will give you signs when spun up if you observant before it finally dies. A good UPS will noticably increase the reliability though.
As for computers that are cycled, yes the thermal expansion can take its toll on the machine. CPUs, video cards, memory, network cards are more likely to fail, though these parts are extremely reliable and even on a PCs that are cycled a lot failures of there parts are still uncommon, and often reseating the part will fix the problem if one crops up. Making sure the computer is well cooled will help with the reliablity as it will reduce the thermal stress. I still recommend a good UPS too.
Actually, even the ones powered by coal are likely not wasting much CO2. Considering a machine is most likely to be sitting idle at night, and that the coal plants have to operate 24/7 (they can't dynamically lower their power output, that's provided by secondary sources during the afternoon). Power usage generally peaks in the afternoon, and so other power generation stations (those like natural gas that can be brought online quickly) handle the peak load, but, as coal power is cheaper, they try to get as much as possible from the coal. If the base load provided by the coal is greater than the power being consumed, than any additional power demanded isn't really "wasting" electricity. It's just using electricity that has already been generated. Of course, if this amount is great enough to change the power plants operating conditions, it does matter, and as far as the businesses are concerned, this power does cost money, and quite a bit of it.
That's bull. A coal power plant can certainly vary its output. It may not be able to vary it very quickly, but the amount of demand given the time of day, temperature, time of year, day of the week, etc. can be fairly predictable which allows a coal power plant to vary its output based upon established trends. Now it is true that it takes a long time to stop and start a coal power plant, so generally they are run at some minimal capacity rather than shut down if they are not needed but it is anticipated that they will be in the next few days. Power companies generally don't do this - if they have four similar 100MW coal plants and they need 80MW of capacity they'll run each one at 20% rather than having one run at 80% and idle the other three as it's more efficient (read: cheaper for the power company).
Now some coal plants are "base load" which means they pretty much run at 100% all of the time. But that doesn't mean they can't vary the output if the base-load demand goes down if people start conserving. Which should be done, as this power is not free in either the environmental or the financial sense.
They might start caring about repairing the computer when the replacement costs $1500 instead of $500. Of course, you can make the argument that troubleshooting a problematic machine isn't worth the time, but a lot of repairs are obvious easy to diagnose, like bad optical drive, bad harddrive, stuff like that. And on a typical Dell you can replace a drive in a minute or two, making it a total no-brainer. Besides, I've found Dell no less reliable than Apple, particularly their newer stuff which runs way too hot.
I'm sure he's just refering to the added wear and tear that using your PS2 to play DVD will cause (as opposed to using a standalone DVD player). It was a bigger deal for the PS2 more than any other console, because at the time a lot of people who were buying PS2s were also planning on using it as a DVD player to save some money since the standalone players weren't cheap at the time.
Dell will only sell you 12G of RAM, but there's no reason you can't put 24G into it - it has 6 DIMM slots.
That's assuming the BIOS would recognize the 4GB sticks, which is not something I would count on. I have some P3 Dells that take PC133, but do not accept anything larger than a 256MB stick, which is pretty limiting nowadays as they only have 2 memory slots.
Most users probably would never notice the difference. You may have two cores, but the disk is still just as slow, you haven't upped the memory bandwidth, the network or USB bus or GPU hasn't gotten any faster. Most things people do today aren't CPU bound, and the CPU spends a lot of its time waiting around for the rest of the computer to give it something to do. If I wanted a responsive computer, I'd take the cheaper of the chips myself, and use the money I save towards a SSD.
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Maybe he meant the first Bush years?
Find a 15.4" laptop you like, add in the 9-cell battery option, and buy it. You shouldn't have to spend more than $1000 to get something decent.
Yeah, but you can easily get the cheap TN-based 17" laptop in the PC world if that's what you want. Not so with Apple.
I disagree. Nowadays, people are holding onto their computers for a lot longer than they used to. It used to be that a 3-5 year old computer was slow compared the latest and greatest, and trying to upgrade it was mostly pointless because the technology had moved on. Now, that 3-5 year old computer is still pretty good, and for the most part does what you want need it do just fine - but it would be nice if it would have a bit more memory, or a bigger drive, or maybe a DVI port so it can drive a big monitor, or maybe USB2 or Firewire ports. That kind of thing is fairly cheap, so people upgrade the machine as they see it's worthwhile to spend a few bucks on "that old computer" because they don't feel the machine is obsolete yet.
Also, you might want to keep in mind that those expansion slots may not be needed now, but they could be very useful later. For example, I knew some people who were pissed at Apple when they dropped Firewire support on the iPod and they had an iMac without USB2. $20 to fix that problem on the PC, and $1500 to fix that problem on the Apple.
A lot of motherboards aimed at the DIY crowd are overclocked slightly from the factory. Probably so they look better on the plots the hardware review sites like to make that make a 3% difference in performance look absolutely huge. 1% is a bit on the high end, but 0.5% is pretty common. Interestingly, most OEM machines seem to be unclocked slightly, I'm not sure why they do that but almost every one I've seen is usually underclocked 0.25-0.5%.
If the computer I'm trying to diagnose has more than one memory stick (thanks to dual-channel, that's almost always the case nowadays), I always swap them around and see if the errors follow the location of the stick or not. It helps to disable dual-channel in the BIOS or arrange the memory sticks in such a way that dual channel won't work so you know which one is testing bad. That way I can make a better guess as to whether the memory is bad or something else with the computer. I figured that was something everyone did. It also helps to have another working computer handy that accepts the same type of memory too.
Most colleges blacklist any unknown MAC address, and to connect to the network, you need to go through some kind of process that ties your MAC to your login. So in other words, simply changing your MAC address randomly to something else wouldn't work, but changing it to another already authorized MAC address worked as you would expect.
I'm not so sure of that. How many places exist where you have a choice between Comcast and Charter? Comcast computes against the local phone company, satellite, and FIOS (where available), not Charter.
The ruling class is almost always conservative. They're on the top after all, and so long as there isn't a threat to their status, they're not going to go around and change things willy-nilly just because (which is more of a liberal thing). Remember, it was a so-called conserative who started the TARP program in the first place.
It's not that other equipment is more reliable. It's just that I'm not going to pay a price premium for equipment no more reliable than stuff I can pick up cheaper.
Also, anyone who tries to a server off of an Xbox360 gets what they deserve.
The article actually states in reference to commodity drives: "There turned out to be surprisingly little hard information about this, with some people having replaced an ADM's drive with no trouble and others experiencing performance or reliability issues."
That's pretty much classic FUD right there.
Command.com still exists on Windows XP. Try it. It's all there in all it's 8.3 filename goodness. I'm not sure exactly what it is there for, except maybe to be backwards compatible with some really old DOS stuff.
You have to move your fingers a lot less with Dvorak rather than Qwerty, which is one of the main ways it gets its speed advantage. You don't need a study for that, it's common sense.
Yeah, but I bet your AC doesn't work very well :)
That's probably because there are very few boards at Newegg that can accept 192GB of ram. And they are very expensive.
Now the base Mac Pro is basically a pretty case, $300 Core i7 processor, a crippled motherboard that only accepts up to 8GB of ram, and outdated graphics for a whopping $2500. It's not hard to do better than that at Newegg, hence the reason why people ripped it apart.
It's not 1998 anymore. 192GB may still be an impressive amount of ram, but it's hardly an impressive amount of...um..data.
Well, it was more like the Internet blew up, and Windows 95 was just along for the ride. It caught Bill Gates by surprise just like many other people. Though the nice thing about Windows 95 is that you could pretty much connect it to a network (or dial up into one) and it would pretty much just work. Getting Windows 3.1 onto a network could be a pretty big pain.
Some PCs leave the USB bus powered up when "off". My homebuilt PC is like this (I have it hooked to a power strip to kill it when off). I'm not sure why they do this - I've seen some that allow you to turn on PC from the USB keyboard which would require this, and others power the PS/2 ports for the same reason. Some also power the PCI bus, presumably for network cards that use wake-on-lan (I've seen this on some Dells, it may be a propriety thing as all my homebuilt PCs didn't do this and required that little 3-wire cable). Others with onboard network power the networking hardware for the same reason.
My advice would be to go into the Bios and disable the wake-on-lan, and disable powering on the PC with the keyboard/mouse. This may help, but I've seen computers that still draw power even with that stuff disabled for no apparent reason.
Leaving the computer on all the time also takes its toll on the computer. Items with moving parts like the harddrives and fans wear out. The computer will clog up with dust faster. Electrolytic capacitors will not last as long. Power spikes and brownouts that happen when the computer would otherwise be off will shorten the life of the power supply and other components.
It's my experience that leaving a computer on all the time will result in more motherboard (capacitor), fan and power supply failures. This will be worse if you don't dust the computer out regularly. Optical and floppy drives will clog up with dust and not work when you need them. The harddrives will not last as long, and they are more likely to go without warning as a harddrive that is starting to fail will give you signs when spun up if you observant before it finally dies. A good UPS will noticably increase the reliability though.
As for computers that are cycled, yes the thermal expansion can take its toll on the machine. CPUs, video cards, memory, network cards are more likely to fail, though these parts are extremely reliable and even on a PCs that are cycled a lot failures of there parts are still uncommon, and often reseating the part will fix the problem if one crops up. Making sure the computer is well cooled will help with the reliablity as it will reduce the thermal stress. I still recommend a good UPS too.
That's bull. A coal power plant can certainly vary its output. It may not be able to vary it very quickly, but the amount of demand given the time of day, temperature, time of year, day of the week, etc. can be fairly predictable which allows a coal power plant to vary its output based upon established trends. Now it is true that it takes a long time to stop and start a coal power plant, so generally they are run at some minimal capacity rather than shut down if they are not needed but it is anticipated that they will be in the next few days. Power companies generally don't do this - if they have four similar 100MW coal plants and they need 80MW of capacity they'll run each one at 20% rather than having one run at 80% and idle the other three as it's more efficient (read: cheaper for the power company).
Now some coal plants are "base load" which means they pretty much run at 100% all of the time. But that doesn't mean they can't vary the output if the base-load demand goes down if people start conserving. Which should be done, as this power is not free in either the environmental or the financial sense.
They might start caring about repairing the computer when the replacement costs $1500 instead of $500. Of course, you can make the argument that troubleshooting a problematic machine isn't worth the time, but a lot of repairs are obvious easy to diagnose, like bad optical drive, bad harddrive, stuff like that. And on a typical Dell you can replace a drive in a minute or two, making it a total no-brainer. Besides, I've found Dell no less reliable than Apple, particularly their newer stuff which runs way too hot.
I'm sure he's just refering to the added wear and tear that using your PS2 to play DVD will cause (as opposed to using a standalone DVD player). It was a bigger deal for the PS2 more than any other console, because at the time a lot of people who were buying PS2s were also planning on using it as a DVD player to save some money since the standalone players weren't cheap at the time.
That's assuming the BIOS would recognize the 4GB sticks, which is not something I would count on. I have some P3 Dells that take PC133, but do not accept anything larger than a 256MB stick, which is pretty limiting nowadays as they only have 2 memory slots.
Well, actually if I was going to nit-pick, I would probably point out that the Apple TV runs a single core Intel processor :)
Most users probably would never notice the difference. You may have two cores, but the disk is still just as slow, you haven't upped the memory bandwidth, the network or USB bus or GPU hasn't gotten any faster. Most things people do today aren't CPU bound, and the CPU spends a lot of its time waiting around for the rest of the computer to give it something to do. If I wanted a responsive computer, I'd take the cheaper of the chips myself, and use the money I save towards a SSD.