Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Like which one? Supplements can be good. I take magnesium and calcium against back pain and it seems to work. None of the docs ever figured out that I needed it. They all either suggested surgery, live with it, or take pain killers. Guess who told me what really worked: A CPA.

sfa?

Maybe find a similar model with a busted LCD on EBay and scrap out the KB? Or get a USB keyboard.

Which particular compounds?

Doctors don't know crap.

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

If my HP dies, I can grab a spare, identical machine from the storage cubicle, plug in a front-panel hot-plug RAID c: drive from the dead machine, and be back up in minutes. Most of that time will be spent under the table groveling with cables. If the OS dies and I can't boot, I can plug in a c: image drive, stored in a baggie, and mount the old c: as d: to get its files, or use my daily files-only d: backup drive and get most of what I need.

Only the paranoid survive.

John

Which SW do you use for synchronizing?

It's just the Costco house brand. Had the best price I could find and I take two every morning. No major "can't move anymore" episode in almost two years :-)

Before that it got really bad at times. To the point where I needed the clothes pole next to my bed to pull me out, keyboard on a large cardboard box so I could CAD work without sitting down and all that.

Sometimes that seems to be so. The other example was our adopted dog. Uncontrollable vomiting, me and my wife on the knees with Windex and the shop vac for 1/2 hour per carpet stain. Vet did >$250 worth of tests. Found nothing, suggested $1000 endoscopy at a far away place but that it might not find anything either. So I went on the Internet one Saturday. After four hours I had it: A preservative in almost all dog foods that had already gotten some FDA scrutiny. Another hour and we found the Canadian dog food "Go Natural" that didn't have any such preservative, plus a dealer close by. Bingo! No more vomiting, no more diarrhia, no more sick puppy faces.

And now there was an article in an IEEE magazine discussing stricter ABET stuff and other red tape, one reason being that the medical profession is benefiting from continued ed requirements and we should pucker up, blah, blah, blah. Pah!

John Larkin hath wroth:

Nice. My experience with RAID hasn't been quite so wonderful. I typically used RAID 1+0 (4 drives). Two drives striped and two mirrored. Anticipating problems, I would usually buy extra identical drives and have them available. What I discovered is that when one drive fails, the others also fail soon after. I would re-mirror to a new drive, and have one of the other drives decide to crash. I've had source drives fail during a re-mirror. I've also re-mirrored, driven away, and had a different drive fail. (Note: I was not monitoring S.M.A.R.T. statistics at the time, but started to do so religiously afterwards).

In one really bizarre incident, I had a small pile of new and never used drives sitting next to the server. The original RAID array had been running for about 2 years when the DPT controller started to complain of errors on one drive. I installed one of the new drives, re-mirrored, and assumed that I was safe. I was waiting for one of the other drives to fail. Instead, the new drive failed almost immediately. So much for the theory that running time affects life time. About a month later, one of the other drives decided to exhibit problem. I convinced the customer it was time to replace ALL the drives.

Yep. I only see broken computers, so my view of computer reliability is rather warped. The good news is that storage has finally become cheap enough to apply massive redundancy. I gave up on RAID and now use mirrored servers.

There are mornings I have to use a good grip on the headboard :-(

Hopefully the hip-replacement will eliminate the strain I'm placing on my lower leg muscles.

...Jim Thompson

Joerg hath wroth:

For Linux and Unix, I use rdist, rsync, and an ugly mess of rcmd based shell scripts that are best left alone for fear of breaking them. I'd recommend rdist.

For Windoze, I use Second Copy:

$30 per user. I don't use many of the fancy features, but like the idea of having them available if I need them. Biggest headache are open files (for which I use an image backup):

Have you looked at "Brute Force Uninstaller?

All I can say from the people with recent hip replacements that I know is that it's much improved from 20 years ago. They feel like a new person. One guy about your age can now hop into his (BIG) truck like never before. When they had a party a couple weeks ago he was dancing, something that would have been quite impossible before.

Yes they do, Jim. But they are just like any other professional that has been schooled one way. Ask a PhD digital engineer how to design a device that will keep the headlights on for 30 seconds after you turn the ignition off and (s)he will tell you how to program a microcontroller for a precise delay time of 30 seconds. You and I would take an RC time constant into a fet and call it good. Depends on your skill set.

Jim

Well, me too, but I suspect for a slightly different reason {;-)

Jim

I can't imagine working at a place where *engineers* weren't allowed control of their own PCs. If I can't trust someone to not screw up their own machine on a regular basis or at least be able to fix it when they do, why in the world would I let them start playing with $80k network analyzers where you can blow up the front end with static if you're not careful? Or high-powered lasers or industrial robots or other devices that can cause very significant damage if not used properly? I can't imagine letting anyone who isn't trusted with a PC ever pick up a plasma cutting torch... aieee!

But regarding the topic at hand... On PCs, backing up data is easy. Short of doing a full disk image, though, do you know of any good program that'll back up installed applications as well?

Thanks,

---Joel

I thought everyone had boxes of spare keyboards in a closet. I'm down to about 100. ;-)

Thanks. Zero errors on mine...

Our IT is in charge of restoring all programs too. So it's just data.

I don't trust DVD backups. Maybe I was using the wrong media at the time though: DVD-RW. Since then I know to use DVD+RW

Michael

If you choose a larger font, some websites become unusable because they position each item by pixel count, rendering a lot of text unreadable, or completely missing.

because

biggers

to

on?

--

student!),

You're an engineer! You should be able to make your own keys.

Nope. Even the keyboard on this PC is very tired. The new Dell will come with a fresh one. More problematic will be one laptop because "e" and "t" are almost eroded away and the touch pad has a serious valley. For some reason mice seen to last longer than keyboards.

because

biggers

to

on?

--

student!),

But it's a client. Leaving the dungeon would almost be like a heart surgeon walking away from the patient.