Stability is one of the main reasons that I ran OS/2 2.0 through 3.0 back in the mid-late 90s. My OS/2 box would stay up and running for ~2 weeks at a time, as opposed to the non-stability of Win 3.1 and Win95. (I would dual-boot to Win95 to run a few games, but that was it.)
NT4 wasn't bad. I ran that for a few years before Win2000 came out. Win2000 was nicer because more things would run (Win2K server seemed to be more stable then NT4). Never had many issues with Win2K that couldn't be traced back to sub-par device drivers or non-system cruft (or flaky hardware). Since WinXP is built on Win2K's codebase, my experience really hasn't changed in a long time.
I have 2 WinXP desktop systems and a WinXP laptop. Uptime for me is generally measured in weeks. My restarts are mostly due to power outages, patches, or software installs. Or, every so often, the laptop will work itself into a frenzy and need to be restarted after 2-3 weeks. The game PC restarts a bit more frequently, mostly due to funky PC games.
More stability is naturally a good thing, but we're pretty much at the "good enough" stage. Now if we can just get Microsoft to point fingers at the folks who write shoddy device drivers. (By that, I mean better post-crash diagnostics that do a better job of informing the end-user about why the system crashed.)
You have some good points, but the thread of your argument doesn't really hang together. I think it gets lost in trying to talk about the pigs and the geese.
One concrete example of the inertia that Microsoft is up against. Take a look at how slowly Windows 2003 server is penetrating the market. It's 2005, and our company *just* rolled out our first two Windows 2003 servers. And that's only because the old Win2k servers desperately needed new hardware. The earliest that we would consider upgrading those servers again is 5+ years down the road.
Things are pretty much the same on the desktop market. Toss more memory in a Win2k box and it's good to go for another 2-3 years. The only WinXP machines in the shop are those which that we've bought over the past few years.
SQL Server 2005? Not a chance. PostgreSQL 8.1 is out and it now runs natively in Win32. Our plan is to continue running SQL Sever 2000 until we've finished migration. The big advantage of PGSQL on Win32 is that we can then decide whether to move to another O/S, without the pain of switching database software at the same time.
It requires a bit of planning. I tend to look at DVD-R/W as a tape of infinite length, that I append to in 4GB chunks. So, every month, I pack up everything that changed or was created in the previous 3 months and dump that off to DVD-R/W. Label the disks in an organized fashion and store them sequentially..
Then I index it so I can search it without mounting the media (SuperCat in Win32 systems). Mostly I want to be able to figure out which DVD-R/W to pull out of storage if I want to recover file X.
I'd still prefer larger disk formats, however... once you get 100 disks in a particular set, pulling data back off of the disks gets to be a pain. Unless you stay organized about your archives.
Aye, we use "intra.companyname.com" as the internal domain (pretty common practice). Makes it easy to spot those internal addresses and you can add static host records without worrying about what the public does or doesn't see. (Our "intra" domain does not get exported outside of the building, so only hosts on the local LAN can resolve against it.)
You can still buy floppy disks from office supply stores.
I still add floppy drives to all of the systems that I spec (order from a company) or build myself. They only cost $9 or so and it's cheap insurance against the day that you really need a floppy drive.
Mostly I use them for flashing BIOSs (motherboard, RAID card, etc). Some of the motherboard BIOSs now let you put the BIOS image on a CD-ROM, and there's a tool built into the motherboard that will read the BIOS image from the CD-ROM and install it (without needing a boot disk). But add-in cards with BIOSs don't have those sorts of features.
Some people get hurt and then complain in real life and on the net and then replace that drive with some other manufacterer, get lucky with that drive and proclaim how great that company is.
And the rest of us plan for failure by using RAID in addition to backups (and system images). I hate running systems without RAID, because I *know* that eventually that drive is going to fail at the worst possible moment.
(I probably have close to a dozen IBM "Deathstars" (the 72GB models that everyone hated) that are still chugging right along. I've probably replaced *2* of them in the past few years and those drives failed early in the cycle and those were likely killed by heat.)
I learned that lesson after killing a 7200rpm SATA drive. (Actually, I learned that lesson back in 1998 with SCSI drives, but I was being lax.)
That's why I like things like the newer PC cases that put the drives sideways and stick a 120mm fan to pull air over them. (Antec Sonata, Antec p160, etc.)
The other key bits in my toolkit are bay coolers. One lets you put up to (3) 3.5" drives into (2) 5.25" bays (try MWave for these), the other is a "4 in 3" bay design (CoolerMaster). If you don't pack them full (e.g. only put 2 drives in the 3:2 unit, or 3 drives in the 4in3 unit), the 80mm/120mm fans on the front keep even hot 7200rpm drives cool to the touch. Plus, the 80/120mm fans are *quiet* when compared to the normal 2x40mm fans used on regular 5.25" bay coolers.
As for power... I used to have a (6) drive ATA RAID that would constantly drop a disk every few weeks. Nothing physically wrong with the disks, the array would simply drop the drive and start rebuilding with the hot spare. Upgrading to a better UPS along with a better case/powersupply fixed the issue for good. (The array stopped dropping drives.)
Stupid stat, but under Linux, when synchronizing a 300GB software RAID1 set, I'm seeing transfer rates of anything from 30-60GB/s. The 5400rpm 300GB drives clocked in at the lower end of that range, while the 7200rpm 300GB drives clocked in at the upper end of the range.
Or, copying from disk to disk on a Windows box (7200rpm 250GB drives), I'll see transfer rates of 30-40MB/s.
Top killers of hard drives (causing them to die early deaths):
1. Heat -- what temperatures are your drives running at? My rule of thumb is anything over ~45C is too hot (because you have no margin of error for fan failure or A/C failure). Grab a copy of SpeedFan (for Windows) or use lmsensors(?) in Linux.
2. Power -- Either poor power from the AC mains or an overwhelmed/cheap power supply. Get a better power supply (or get the proper size one) and evaluate your AC power.
I'm not so sure that 7200rpm has a lot to do with it. The bigger issue for transfer rates is areal density (I think that's the term). If you can pass twice as many bits/sec under the drive heads at the same RPM, you end up with twice the transfer rate.
A good example of this is to compare older, 40GB 7200rpm drives with newer 300GB 7200rpm drives. The 300GB drives are (probably) a higher density platter and should reflect a higher transfer rate.
I doubt you will see 10k rpm drives in a 3.5" package (well, maybe... the Raptors are 10k rpm, but I'm not sure that they're not 2.5" disks). I'm too lazy to do the math at the moment, but you'll want to take a look at (a) the speed of the outer edge of the platter at various RPMs and (b) the centrifigal force that the edge of the platter is undergoing at higher RPMs. Plus the issue that in order to spin a disk at faster RPMs, it requires more energy (exponential?). I'm almost positive that the 10k and 15k RPM SCSI drives are all 2.5" platters.
If/when perpendicular recording finally hits (which will roughly double current capacities per platter) we might see another speed boost in throughput.
The database itself is not that bad, for what it is supposed to be used. But some people implement relational stuff in Notes (yes boss, I am talking to you), and this is deadly, deadly, deadly. Notes is a document based database that stores documents with random fields, and the fields have no structure. For many things this is OK. For things with connections between documents this is not OK.
That matches my experience with Lotus Notes back in the late 90s. For what it was designed to do (replication, document storage with ad-hoc), it was very very good. For users who need portable access to documentation, with easy syncrhonization, it makes a lot of sense. (Applications like insurance adjusters, realtors, other service industries that travel to customer sites and don't always have connections back to the home office.)
Unfortunately, there are too many Lotus Notes developers (and users) who think everything needs to be a Lotus Notes database. So you end up with some nasty shoe-horned projects that would've been better off developed either as client-server or web-centric (with a relation database backend).
I have mixed feelings about Notes. It had a lot of strengths, but being forced to use it in odd ways gave me too many support headaches. Very cool capabilities with a nasty and inconsistent user-interface.
Sadly, punch-the-monkey style ads are still around. As...
Hit the mailbox (picture a delinquent hanging out the car window as mailboxes fly by on the side of the road). This one tees me off a bit because it's advocating vandalism.
Hit Osama (he has hung his AK-47 on the wall and has put on a pair of boxing gloves). Very cliche.
Pretty sure there was one where you shoot at ducks (shooting-gallery style ducks). I've also seen half-a-dozen other variants that I can't remember off-hand.
Books like that are a lifetime investment. I can reach behind my shoulder here in my office and pull down 3 books on basic LAN topology (written in the early 90s), a pair of books specifically dealing with TCP/IP and a pair of books that deal with linking LANs together. Oh, and 2 old study guides for the MCSE tests dealing with TCP/IP and Networking Essentials. And that doesn't even get into the half a dozen books on firewalls, security, and locking down a network/server.
And even though those books are 5-10+ years old, a lot of what is in them still applies to modern day networks.
Heck, my personal rule of thumb for anyone in the tech field. Read at least one new book per quarter. Find an area that you don't know enough about or need to brush up on and get a book that covers that subject.
The big advantage of dead-tree print is that you can mark your place, measure your progress in covering the material, and you don't have to be chained to the screen to read it.
For folks using Windows on the desktop, that made it much easier to install and play with then PostGreSQL. (Having to muck with cygwin was a big turnoff.)
Now that PGSQL has a Win32 package, I'm planning on standardizing on it.
MSSQL also allows you to see the existence of other databases on a shared db server, but you can't look inside them.
A good hosting company should use semi-random names for the user databases rather then using a more identifiable name. The downside is that it relies keeping track of those names elsewhere (in yet another database!).
Most of those were not around back in 2000 when I rolled out my MSSQL server. Plus, you either had to muck with cygwin (not always a pleasant beast) or wait until recently for PostGreSQL to run on a MS-Windows server.
The tools have improved a lot in the past few years. Having a native Win32 version of PostGreSQL makes a big difference to those of us who *want* to leave MS behind but can't do it in one fell swoop. There's only so many things you can change per annum in a working system before you drive yourself crazy. (Plus, we've already bought and paid for that copy of MSSQL, so it's sunk cost.)
Our next migration will definitely be to move our databases off of MSSQL and onto a PostGreSQL platform. Saves us a few grand in licensing/upgrade fees. That's worth the time to retrain the few folks who have to work directly with the database.
Besides... I get final say in which product we use.
I've found it interesting at how fast PCIe is penetrating the market and driving AGP out. My initial expectation was that PCIe would take until mid-2006 to reach this point. However, just like you can still buy PCI boards you'll probably be able to buy AGP boards. But yeah, they probably won't be the latest and greatest anymore. ATI is taking a gamble by only making PCIe cards. If they're wrong, then those AGP sales will go to a competitor.
I have yet to buy a PCIe board. Probably my next game machine upgrade next year will be the first one. By then, my Opteron 148 system with a GeForce 6800 will be easily replaced with a dual-core and the prices on the dual-core chips will be low enough to pay for a $300 PCIe video card.
AGP had a good run. The impact of AGP was lessened because you could still put a PCI video card into an AGP system. But most video card manufacturers stopped making PCI video cards, focusing their efforts on AGP. So if you had a system without an AGP slot, you were stuck when it came time to upgrade. OTOH, if you had a fairly recent PCI card you could buy a new motherboard and still use your old video card.
This changover is painful because PCIe boards don't include an AGP slot. We've all been a bit spoiled by AGP letting us move a card from system to system as we upgraded. Unless, you bought a new motherboard that only supported 1.5V AGP cards... then you ended up in the same boat as the AGP/PCIe rift, but it wasn't as obvious.
As for your particular situation... bump your RAM up as high as it will go and you can probably use that system for another 2-3 years. I have 2GB and I'm starting to consider bumping it up to 3 or 4GB. (But only if I don't have to throw out a chip... I've forgotten whether I have 4x512 or 2x1024 in there.) The extra memory won't cost me that much, but it keeps the system from feeling slow because it's buried in the swap file.
There are some benchmark sites around. One of the popular ones is Aquamark3. They even have a database where you can compare your scores against other folks that have similar hardware. The trick is figuring out how to filter out the folks who have overclocked their systems.
Alternately, video card listing, which is a nice cheat sheet for figuring out whether a particular card is a "DX9" card or not.
People, please do not spend more than $150 on video card.
Tell you what, when you pay my bills, you can tell me what the frick to spend on a video card. In the meantime, take your attempt to control other folks behavior and shove it where the sun don't shine.
For the rest of us who enjoy the free market, we're quite willing to spend those sums of money on our hobbies. Value is in the eye of the beholder and is a personal opinion.
Now, on a realistic note, I agree with their price point. If you look at the prices and capabilities of cards, $250-$300 is indeed a sweet spot for getting a very good card at a very good price. Beyond $300, the prices go up dramatically but performance is only marginally better. Below $250 it's pretty linear $/performance.
If you don't have $250-$300, then just accept the fact that you are not in the market segment for these cards. At least not until next year when their price drops.
I got hooked on a hatchback because my g/f at the time had an older Dodge 2-door hatchback (Sundance?). At the time I was driving an old Ford Crown Vic LTD, which was a beast and a boat. The Sundance was a pleasure to drive. Nice and small and full of utility.
If my website was up, you could see a pic of my 2001 Focus ZX3 (alternate). Having that roofrack allowed me to take a 2-week road trip with all of my luggage hidden either in the roof carrier or in the rear cargo area. Nothing in the passenger compartment.
The big downside to a hatchback like the Focus... no trunk space for storing emergency road service type stuff or other common car trunk items. Not much room in the spare tire area for extra goodies. The roof carrier helps, but lowers the MPG.
There are two nice items that I've found for cooling drives.
1) A 3 in 2 drive bay unit. This allows you to place up to (3) 3.5" drives into a pair of 5.25" drive bays. The unit comes with an 80mm fan on the front along with a front filter. Your best bet is to use this as a 2 drive in 2 bay configuration. That gives more airflow to each drive, plus uses an 80mm fan (wich is quieter) rather then (4) 40mm fans (noisy). I think I found my last one at Mwave.com (part #BA21364). If you have a pair of hot drives and a pair of 5.25" bays free, this unit is the perfect match.
I've used one of these 3:2 bay units for a few years now. Nice flexibility for older cases without a dedicated drive bay fan. The downside is that you have a longer cable run (usually) to get up to the 5.25" bays. But this is a non-issue with SCSI or SATA. Took me a while to find another company that carried them, but finally MWave started stocking them.
2) A 4 in 3 drive bay unit. I found these over at CaseMod.com. Same concept, except that it fits up to (4) 3.5" drives into (3) 5.25" bays. The fan is a 120mm fan (even quieter then the 80mm), but it doesn't come with a filter on the front. Ideal for tower cases where you have (4) 5.25" bays and you've put a CD/DVD in the top bay and have the next (3) bays open.
For better cooling, you could stick with only putting (3) drives into the unit instead of (4).
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That's been my experience as well.
Stability is one of the main reasons that I ran OS/2 2.0 through 3.0 back in the mid-late 90s. My OS/2 box would stay up and running for ~2 weeks at a time, as opposed to the non-stability of Win 3.1 and Win95. (I would dual-boot to Win95 to run a few games, but that was it.)
NT4 wasn't bad. I ran that for a few years before Win2000 came out. Win2000 was nicer because more things would run (Win2K server seemed to be more stable then NT4). Never had many issues with Win2K that couldn't be traced back to sub-par device drivers or non-system cruft (or flaky hardware). Since WinXP is built on Win2K's codebase, my experience really hasn't changed in a long time.
I have 2 WinXP desktop systems and a WinXP laptop. Uptime for me is generally measured in weeks. My restarts are mostly due to power outages, patches, or software installs. Or, every so often, the laptop will work itself into a frenzy and need to be restarted after 2-3 weeks. The game PC restarts a bit more frequently, mostly due to funky PC games.
More stability is naturally a good thing, but we're pretty much at the "good enough" stage. Now if we can just get Microsoft to point fingers at the folks who write shoddy device drivers. (By that, I mean better post-crash diagnostics that do a better job of informing the end-user about why the system crashed.)
You have some good points, but the thread of your argument doesn't really hang together. I think it gets lost in trying to talk about the pigs and the geese.
One concrete example of the inertia that Microsoft is up against. Take a look at how slowly Windows 2003 server is penetrating the market. It's 2005, and our company *just* rolled out our first two Windows 2003 servers. And that's only because the old Win2k servers desperately needed new hardware. The earliest that we would consider upgrading those servers again is 5+ years down the road.
Things are pretty much the same on the desktop market. Toss more memory in a Win2k box and it's good to go for another 2-3 years. The only WinXP machines in the shop are those which that we've bought over the past few years.
SQL Server 2005? Not a chance. PostgreSQL 8.1 is out and it now runs natively in Win32. Our plan is to continue running SQL Sever 2000 until we've finished migration. The big advantage of PGSQL on Win32 is that we can then decide whether to move to another O/S, without the pain of switching database software at the same time.
$100 for a rewritable 300GB disc wouldn't be bad. Too expensive for my tastes if it's WORM.
The bigger question is how expensive the drives are going to be.
It requires a bit of planning. I tend to look at DVD-R/W as a tape of infinite length, that I append to in 4GB chunks. So, every month, I pack up everything that changed or was created in the previous 3 months and dump that off to DVD-R/W. Label the disks in an organized fashion and store them sequentially..
Then I index it so I can search it without mounting the media (SuperCat in Win32 systems). Mostly I want to be able to figure out which DVD-R/W to pull out of storage if I want to recover file X.
I'd still prefer larger disk formats, however... once you get 100 disks in a particular set, pulling data back off of the disks gets to be a pain. Unless you stay organized about your archives.
Aye, we use "intra.companyname.com" as the internal domain (pretty common practice). Makes it easy to spot those internal addresses and you can add static host records without worrying about what the public does or doesn't see. (Our "intra" domain does not get exported outside of the building, so only hosts on the local LAN can resolve against it.)
You can still buy floppy disks from office supply stores.
I still add floppy drives to all of the systems that I spec (order from a company) or build myself. They only cost $9 or so and it's cheap insurance against the day that you really need a floppy drive.
Mostly I use them for flashing BIOSs (motherboard, RAID card, etc). Some of the motherboard BIOSs now let you put the BIOS image on a CD-ROM, and there's a tool built into the motherboard that will read the BIOS image from the CD-ROM and install it (without needing a boot disk). But add-in cards with BIOSs don't have those sorts of features.
Some people get hurt and then complain in real life and on the net and then replace that drive with some other manufacterer, get lucky with that drive and proclaim how great that company is.
And the rest of us plan for failure by using RAID in addition to backups (and system images). I hate running systems without RAID, because I *know* that eventually that drive is going to fail at the worst possible moment.
(I probably have close to a dozen IBM "Deathstars" (the 72GB models that everyone hated) that are still chugging right along. I've probably replaced *2* of them in the past few years and those drives failed early in the cycle and those were likely killed by heat.)
Yep yep yep.
I learned that lesson after killing a 7200rpm SATA drive. (Actually, I learned that lesson back in 1998 with SCSI drives, but I was being lax.)
That's why I like things like the newer PC cases that put the drives sideways and stick a 120mm fan to pull air over them. (Antec Sonata, Antec p160, etc.)
The other key bits in my toolkit are bay coolers. One lets you put up to (3) 3.5" drives into (2) 5.25" bays (try MWave for these), the other is a "4 in 3" bay design (CoolerMaster). If you don't pack them full (e.g. only put 2 drives in the 3:2 unit, or 3 drives in the 4in3 unit), the 80mm/120mm fans on the front keep even hot 7200rpm drives cool to the touch. Plus, the 80/120mm fans are *quiet* when compared to the normal 2x40mm fans used on regular 5.25" bay coolers.
As for power... I used to have a (6) drive ATA RAID that would constantly drop a disk every few weeks. Nothing physically wrong with the disks, the array would simply drop the drive and start rebuilding with the hot spare. Upgrading to a better UPS along with a better case/powersupply fixed the issue for good. (The array stopped dropping drives.)
Older, smaller drives (40GB - 72GB), maybe.
Stupid stat, but under Linux, when synchronizing a 300GB software RAID1 set, I'm seeing transfer rates of anything from 30-60GB/s. The 5400rpm 300GB drives clocked in at the lower end of that range, while the 7200rpm 300GB drives clocked in at the upper end of the range.
Or, copying from disk to disk on a Windows box (7200rpm 250GB drives), I'll see transfer rates of 30-40MB/s.
(Inserts the usual litany)
Top killers of hard drives (causing them to die early deaths):
1. Heat -- what temperatures are your drives running at? My rule of thumb is anything over ~45C is too hot (because you have no margin of error for fan failure or A/C failure). Grab a copy of SpeedFan (for Windows) or use lmsensors(?) in Linux.
2. Power -- Either poor power from the AC mains or an overwhelmed/cheap power supply. Get a better power supply (or get the proper size one) and evaluate your AC power.
I'm not so sure that 7200rpm has a lot to do with it. The bigger issue for transfer rates is areal density (I think that's the term). If you can pass twice as many bits/sec under the drive heads at the same RPM, you end up with twice the transfer rate.
A good example of this is to compare older, 40GB 7200rpm drives with newer 300GB 7200rpm drives. The 300GB drives are (probably) a higher density platter and should reflect a higher transfer rate.
I doubt you will see 10k rpm drives in a 3.5" package (well, maybe... the Raptors are 10k rpm, but I'm not sure that they're not 2.5" disks). I'm too lazy to do the math at the moment, but you'll want to take a look at (a) the speed of the outer edge of the platter at various RPMs and (b) the centrifigal force that the edge of the platter is undergoing at higher RPMs. Plus the issue that in order to spin a disk at faster RPMs, it requires more energy (exponential?). I'm almost positive that the 10k and 15k RPM SCSI drives are all 2.5" platters.
If/when perpendicular recording finally hits (which will roughly double current capacities per platter) we might see another speed boost in throughput.
The database itself is not that bad, for what it is supposed to be used. But some people implement relational stuff in Notes (yes boss, I am talking to you), and this is deadly, deadly, deadly. Notes is a document based database that stores documents with random fields, and the fields have no structure. For many things this is OK. For things with connections between documents this is not OK.
That matches my experience with Lotus Notes back in the late 90s. For what it was designed to do (replication, document storage with ad-hoc), it was very very good. For users who need portable access to documentation, with easy syncrhonization, it makes a lot of sense. (Applications like insurance adjusters, realtors, other service industries that travel to customer sites and don't always have connections back to the home office.)
Unfortunately, there are too many Lotus Notes developers (and users) who think everything needs to be a Lotus Notes database. So you end up with some nasty shoe-horned projects that would've been better off developed either as client-server or web-centric (with a relation database backend).
I have mixed feelings about Notes. It had a lot of strengths, but being forced to use it in odd ways gave me too many support headaches. Very cool capabilities with a nasty and inconsistent user-interface.
Sadly, punch-the-monkey style ads are still around. As...
Hit the mailbox (picture a delinquent hanging out the car window as mailboxes fly by on the side of the road). This one tees me off a bit because it's advocating vandalism.
Hit Osama (he has hung his AK-47 on the wall and has put on a pair of boxing gloves). Very cliche.
Pretty sure there was one where you shoot at ducks (shooting-gallery style ducks). I've also seen half-a-dozen other variants that I can't remember off-hand.
Books like that are a lifetime investment. I can reach behind my shoulder here in my office and pull down 3 books on basic LAN topology (written in the early 90s), a pair of books specifically dealing with TCP/IP and a pair of books that deal with linking LANs together. Oh, and 2 old study guides for the MCSE tests dealing with TCP/IP and Networking Essentials. And that doesn't even get into the half a dozen books on firewalls, security, and locking down a network/server.
And even though those books are 5-10+ years old, a lot of what is in them still applies to modern day networks.
Heck, my personal rule of thumb for anyone in the tech field. Read at least one new book per quarter. Find an area that you don't know enough about or need to brush up on and get a book that covers that subject.
The big advantage of dead-tree print is that you can mark your place, measure your progress in covering the material, and you don't have to be chained to the screen to read it.
The other book I've been using (in addition to "Building Secure Servers with Linux") is "Practical Unix & Internet Security" (also O'Reilly).
I think I'll add this one to the stack as well.
(claps politely)
Very nice application of an old and dated joke.
(bellies up and asks for the joke to be explained)
Obscure video game reference (I could envision the Tomb Raider series having a level like this)? Or some obscure movie/book reference?
You missed #5... MySQL had a native Win32 port.
For folks using Windows on the desktop, that made it much easier to install and play with then PostGreSQL. (Having to muck with cygwin was a big turnoff.)
Now that PGSQL has a Win32 package, I'm planning on standardizing on it.
MSSQL also allows you to see the existence of other databases on a shared db server, but you can't look inside them.
A good hosting company should use semi-random names for the user databases rather then using a more identifiable name. The downside is that it relies keeping track of those names elsewhere (in yet another database!).
Most of those were not around back in 2000 when I rolled out my MSSQL server. Plus, you either had to muck with cygwin (not always a pleasant beast) or wait until recently for PostGreSQL to run on a MS-Windows server.
The tools have improved a lot in the past few years. Having a native Win32 version of PostGreSQL makes a big difference to those of us who *want* to leave MS behind but can't do it in one fell swoop. There's only so many things you can change per annum in a working system before you drive yourself crazy. (Plus, we've already bought and paid for that copy of MSSQL, so it's sunk cost.)
Our next migration will definitely be to move our databases off of MSSQL and onto a PostGreSQL platform. Saves us a few grand in licensing/upgrade fees. That's worth the time to retrain the few folks who have to work directly with the database.
Besides... I get final say in which product we use.
I've found it interesting at how fast PCIe is penetrating the market and driving AGP out. My initial expectation was that PCIe would take until mid-2006 to reach this point. However, just like you can still buy PCI boards you'll probably be able to buy AGP boards. But yeah, they probably won't be the latest and greatest anymore. ATI is taking a gamble by only making PCIe cards. If they're wrong, then those AGP sales will go to a competitor.
I have yet to buy a PCIe board. Probably my next game machine upgrade next year will be the first one. By then, my Opteron 148 system with a GeForce 6800 will be easily replaced with a dual-core and the prices on the dual-core chips will be low enough to pay for a $300 PCIe video card.
AGP had a good run. The impact of AGP was lessened because you could still put a PCI video card into an AGP system. But most video card manufacturers stopped making PCI video cards, focusing their efforts on AGP. So if you had a system without an AGP slot, you were stuck when it came time to upgrade. OTOH, if you had a fairly recent PCI card you could buy a new motherboard and still use your old video card.
This changover is painful because PCIe boards don't include an AGP slot. We've all been a bit spoiled by AGP letting us move a card from system to system as we upgraded. Unless, you bought a new motherboard that only supported 1.5V AGP cards... then you ended up in the same boat as the AGP/PCIe rift, but it wasn't as obvious.
As for your particular situation... bump your RAM up as high as it will go and you can probably use that system for another 2-3 years. I have 2GB and I'm starting to consider bumping it up to 3 or 4GB. (But only if I don't have to throw out a chip... I've forgotten whether I have 4x512 or 2x1024 in there.) The extra memory won't cost me that much, but it keeps the system from feeling slow because it's buried in the swap file.
There are some benchmark sites around. One of the popular ones is Aquamark3. They even have a database where you can compare your scores against other folks that have similar hardware. The trick is figuring out how to filter out the folks who have overclocked their systems.
Alternately, video card listing, which is a nice cheat sheet for figuring out whether a particular card is a "DX9" card or not.
People, please do not spend more than $150 on video card.
Tell you what, when you pay my bills, you can tell me what the frick to spend on a video card. In the meantime, take your attempt to control other folks behavior and shove it where the sun don't shine.
For the rest of us who enjoy the free market, we're quite willing to spend those sums of money on our hobbies. Value is in the eye of the beholder and is a personal opinion.
Now, on a realistic note, I agree with their price point. If you look at the prices and capabilities of cards, $250-$300 is indeed a sweet spot for getting a very good card at a very good price. Beyond $300, the prices go up dramatically but performance is only marginally better. Below $250 it's pretty linear $/performance.
If you don't have $250-$300, then just accept the fact that you are not in the market segment for these cards. At least not until next year when their price drops.
I got hooked on a hatchback because my g/f at the time had an older Dodge 2-door hatchback (Sundance?). At the time I was driving an old Ford Crown Vic LTD, which was a beast and a boat. The Sundance was a pleasure to drive. Nice and small and full of utility.
If my website was up, you could see a pic of my 2001 Focus ZX3 (alternate). Having that roofrack allowed me to take a 2-week road trip with all of my luggage hidden either in the roof carrier or in the rear cargo area. Nothing in the passenger compartment.
The big downside to a hatchback like the Focus... no trunk space for storing emergency road service type stuff or other common car trunk items. Not much room in the spare tire area for extra goodies. The roof carrier helps, but lowers the MPG.
There are two nice items that I've found for cooling drives.
1) A 3 in 2 drive bay unit. This allows you to place up to (3) 3.5" drives into a pair of 5.25" drive bays. The unit comes with an 80mm fan on the front along with a front filter. Your best bet is to use this as a 2 drive in 2 bay configuration. That gives more airflow to each drive, plus uses an 80mm fan (wich is quieter) rather then (4) 40mm fans (noisy). I think I found my last one at Mwave.com (part #BA21364). If you have a pair of hot drives and a pair of 5.25" bays free, this unit is the perfect match.
I've used one of these 3:2 bay units for a few years now. Nice flexibility for older cases without a dedicated drive bay fan. The downside is that you have a longer cable run (usually) to get up to the 5.25" bays. But this is a non-issue with SCSI or SATA. Took me a while to find another company that carried them, but finally MWave started stocking them.
2) A 4 in 3 drive bay unit. I found these over at CaseMod.com. Same concept, except that it fits up to (4) 3.5" drives into (3) 5.25" bays. The fan is a 120mm fan (even quieter then the 80mm), but it doesn't come with a filter on the front. Ideal for tower cases where you have (4) 5.25" bays and you've put a CD/DVD in the top bay and have the next (3) bays open.
For better cooling, you could stick with only putting (3) drives into the unit instead of (4).