Low end desktop for EE tasks?

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

How easy was life in the days of DOS.

That's roughly what I do. Three rotating sticks, plus one. Only good brands like Sandisk or Lexar.

Hey, don't give me nightmares here ;-)

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.

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.

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:37:33 -0700, Joerg wrote: [snippage]

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.

"Nico Coesel" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@news.planet.nl...

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!!

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

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 ;-)

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

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

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 ...

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 :-(

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.

Would you like a nice Viewsonic PF795 CRT to try out a dual-monitor setup on? (See:

---Joel

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.

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 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

has diarrhea or a sinus headache he puts in a chit with

for discussion, not that it ever helped anyone,

him

...

away. He's just an idiot and knows nothing about

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.]

OpenGL hardware acceleration?

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

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.

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

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

snipped-for-privacy@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) hath wroth:

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.