Low end desktop for EE tasks?

I think doctors have been so burned by litigation that they're afraid to make a decision not based on test, test, test...

...Jim Thompson

Tantalums are great if you never push a lot of pulse current into them. Aluminums eventually dry out.

John

Cars wear out pretty fast.If there's a penny savings the manufacturer might well pick the low leakage aluminum.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

True. In a timer they can be useful but they are expensive. Also not very suitable if the timing needs to be better than 25% or so.

Had an article in our local paper today. It stated exactly that attitude as the main cause for GM's poor sales.

The trick is to find a solution that doesn't cost more but is of higher quality. A dome light not turning off may seem innocent but can be a major inconvenience if you return to your car at the airport parking lot late at night after a 10 day biz trip. Turn the key, click, silence ... expletive.

IME, usually the optimal solution costs a bit more than the absolute cheapest solution that meets the specs.

I find it useful to have a feel for d(value)/d$. As consumers, we make that kind of decision all the time when we decide to spend another $40 for a HDD that's 50% bigger, but to eschew the extended warranty or whatever.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!grolier!sn-xt-sjc-02!sn-xt-sjc-08!sn-post-sjc-01!supernews.com!news.supernews.com!not-for-mail

Two weeks ago, I had the crash from hell on one of my home machines. It had halted a couple of times for no reason and I had the side cover off. Pressed the ON button and saw a puff of smoke from the Power Supply. Found burned up components in the supply. Replaced the supply but no startup. Voltages all OK, MB obviously bad. Bought a used replacement MB and installed. No drives attached and only the video card installed, MB starts up, finds Keyboard, and goes to Setup. Attached HDD and started up but BIOS doesn't detect HDD or CDR. Installed second hard drive which is detected OK. Diskette drive is detected so use Windows XP Startup diskette to boot. FDISK and Format new HDD OK. Prepare to re-install Windows. Have to install W98 first from CD to install XP upgrade. BIOS only detects one of the CD drives so Windows CD in. Drive won't read anything. Installed another CD Drive which is detected and get W98 installed. Then the usual re-installation process for OS and programs. Took about 10 days. Fortunately, no business loss here. I'm retired.

The moral is that at any time, a simple Power Supply failure can wipe out everything. I lost MB, HDD, CDR, DVD, and even USB Wireless Adapter. And yes, the power supply was not crap and had been working for seven years. Good Luck to All.

Ken Fowler

ignition

I take a close look at the extended warranty without buying it. The cost per year is a pretty clear indicator for the level of confidence the manufacturers have in their own products. One reason we don't have a flat screen TV yet.

The word I got was that this is unnecessary. All you need to do is present the 98 install media for inspection before proceeding.

You seem to have cleared your *linebreak at ~72 characters* setting in your newsreader.

...and you sure do leave A LOT of "context" when you "bottom-post".

border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!grolier!sn-xt-sjc-02!sn-xt-sjc-08!sn-post-sjc-01!supernews.com!news.supernews.com!not-for-mail

halted a couple of

saw a puff of smoke

supply but no

installed. No drives

goes to Setup.

second hard drive which

to boot. FDISK and

from CD to install XP

read anything.

usual re-installation

loss here. I'm retired.

everything. I lost MB,

not crap and had been

I had one of those where +5V went up to +12V... lots of curly smoke... killed HDD _and_ MB :-(

...Jim Thompson

For general purpose office work, a mouse is fine. However, once you've done layouts and such using a wireless trackball, you'll never use another mouse in your life.

Jim

-- "If you think you can, or think you can't, you're right." --Henry Ford

Yes. Earlier this year I had to do a large design and was looking for a trackball because mine didn't work with those "new" lower RS232 voltage levels. This old disintegrating PC here is fine for Gerber views and stuff but not for real CAD, and the other PCs have LV-RS232. Couldn't find any trackballs that fit my paws so I got a Logitech wireless mouse. Pretty nice.

I'll see if that new Dell will accept my old RS232/LPT card (I sure hope so...) and then my old Trackman will be back. Yeehaw!

That first-edition grandpa of all trackballs was the best because you can keep the fingers spread apart. Most new ones require some clutching. It's like with cars where I never understand why the pedals on new ones are so close. With shoe size 13 and hiking boots that's a problem.

You can take a break and get a little fresh air without the warden finding out. :)

The problem is that we have lawyers and politicians practicing medicine, instead of doctors.

Make that lawyers, politicians and bean counters.

"Joel Kolstad" hath wroth:

Sorry. I forgot we were talking about engineers as users. That's quite different as operating and configuring computers is part of their tool kit, and not just an office appliance. I have only a few technically qualified customers. However, even those have machines that are at least partially locked down allegedly to prevent security problems, but really to keep the engineering from wasting company time tinkering with their computers. I had one architect proudly proclaim that he trashed an entire day fixing a computer problem, that I could have fixed in 10 minutes. Yeah, I would trust them to control, configure, and eventually trash their machines, but the boss that pays their salaries isn't quite so trusting. I've also preformed far too many system rescue operations precipitated by very competent individuals doing incredibly stupid things with computers.

Question: Do you know of any intelligent engineer, who cannot resist installing every utility program he finds on the internet? I don't and have spent far too much time undoing the damage.

Incidentally, there are really smart ones, that use a Linux boot disk to mount NTFS partitions, hack whatever they please, tweak the registry, and then cover their tracks. I leave them alone.

I only have one customer that has an engineering lab full of test equipment. They have two types of computers. One group is strictly for use within the lab and does NOT connect to the corporate LAN. The engineers and techs can do what they please with these. Just don't call IT for help when you trash these. Most of these are used for data collection and instrument control. There is a connection to the internet, but it's completely independent of the corporate gateway.

The other class of machines are connected to the corporate LAN and are locked down just like all the other desktops in the company. Only IT gets to play with those. Incidentally, most of IT is outsourced to some company in India, which creates some interesting problems.

They're very different skills, but I see your point. Competence in one area of expertise automatically qualifies that person to be competent in computing. I don't think so. I know some people that are very competent in their areas of expertise, that are an absolute disaster in front of a PC. Show me some PC expertise and experience, and I might allow them to perhaps format a floppy, or something equally trivial.

No. The problem is synchronizing the changes in the Program Files directory, the well hidden crap under \Docs&Sets\User_name\Local Settings, \Docs&Sets\User_name\Applications Data, the registry, and perhaps stuff in My Docs. Windoze apps just spray garbage all over the place. If they only had one section used in the registry, it might be possible. However, some applications have literally thousands of entries that have to be backed up. Applying them to the registry on a different machine always causes problems. I make good money recovering from the mess created by so called applications "movers" that try to do that. The only safe way to move an application is with a reinstall, followed by a data file transplant.

If you feel like gambling, you can try just backing up just the data files, and hope that you haven't missed anything. A dry run to a new machine would test for any problems, but nobody has time to do that with all the machine and applications. In my never humble opinion, the only thing that works EVERY time, is an image backup. It's not a horrible as it sounds. I was doing one on my office machine last night while I was cleaning a laptop that had filled full of dust (from Burning Man) and left to ossify. Using Norton Ghost 2003, 30GBytes of live data to 6ea DVD+R on a 16x burner took about 4 hours elapsed time. If I had been paying attention when it asked for a DVD change, I think it would been done in about 2hrs. At 25cents per DVD, that's $1.50 per backup. Incidentally, I've done restores this way and they take about twice as long as the original backup. Also, my office backups are stored at home, and my home backups are stored in the office.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com hath wroth:

Ok, just make sure you backup ALL the data. The only way to test that is to do a dry run on a new machine. If you're paranoid, you might want to convince IT that it's time for a fire drill. For what it's worth, I've done that a few times at several of my customers, with not very good results. There's ALWAYS something that just doesn't seem to get backed up. For example, the Quickbooks data backup and restore I previously mentioned successfully restored the data and the company settings, but not the program preferences and appearance. There are also chronic problems with open files not being backed up. It's repeated failures to restore from data only and incremental backups that inspired me to use image backups. However, the real reason was speed. Image backups and restores are considerably faster than file by file. Much less HD head motion involved. Time to recovery is important.

I know where that came from. There was an article several years ago allegedly by an IBM researcher proclaiming that DVD's were not suitable for archival storage because of the limited lifetime of the dyes involved. I won't go into the merits of the claims, but the result has been some rather inflated claims of extended lifetime and "archival quality" media, with correspondingly inflated prices. I've done my own UV fade testing and found that I could kill a DVD+R if I left it in the sun (on my office roof) for about 3 months. The DVD-R and DVD+RW disks went for 5 months before I gave up (when the HVAC repairman threw away my test disks). Anyway, find a better excuse to not do backups.

Hi Jeff,

Not only operating and configuring, but also programming in many cases. It does depend on the particular user, of course.

Understood, and that's not a particularly unreasonable policy, although I would point out that -- at least with good engineers -- the line between "wasting time" and "research that might eventually turn into a profitable product" is often blurry. Historically, many of the best circuits came out of some engineer goofing around with some particular part of topology he wanted to understand better, and with software the canonical example is Google where

I think I've related before how I worked at one big company where the IT policy was... your user account was just a "power user" or similar to start, and if you wanted to be an admin, just call up IT can give them a credible explanation of why you need to be one and -- poof! -- you're it. Took no more than two minutes in my case. The deal was that once you're an admin, you were agreeing that you were "self supporting" as far as maintaining your PC goes and that IT's only responsibility if you thoroughly hose your machine's configuration was to restore it to the stock configuration they had imaged on a hard drive somewhere. That was a reasonable policy that respected the legitimate need of some engineers to completely control their own PCs while making sure that the "casual tweaker" wouldn't immediately shoot himself in the foot.

Where I am now, everyone (well, all the engineers at least) has two accounts -- a "power user" account and an "admin" account. The idea is that you generally spend your day logged on as a power user, and then use "run as" or similar tools to give yourself admin access when needed... or just log out and back on with your admin account if you need to have extensive needs. This too balances security with recognizing the legitimate admin needs of engineers. (And so far I only know one engineer who just changed his power user account into an admin account as well :-), but that really was because he had a lot of problems with certain software that didn't work with the power user account and -- unlike me -- didn't feel like "goofing off" and creating scripts to just run specific programs as an admin! :-) )

Sure, but he presumably learned a lot about his PC in that day, don't you think? Whether or not that's worthwhile is of course up to the guy paying his paycheck, of course.

In one of the books I have (possibly Jim William's one on analog techniques) there's an anecdote about how the protagonist gets a job in charge of an electronics lab. He submits a budget to his superior, which is completely approved except for one item: A request for so-many dollars for out-of-house equipment repair. "No," the boss says, "everything that breaks -- including what you inadvertently blow up yourself -- will be fixed by you." Although he's annoyed at the time, over the course of years he recognizes that it forces him to sit down and analyze a lot of designs from which he learns and thereby becomes a much better designer himself. So while in the short term the company ends up having him "waste time" spending days fixing designs that could have been repaired out of house for far less, in the long term they end up with a much more capable and hence valuable employee.

Of course, in today's world such long-term thinking is somewhat uncommon.

Sure, plenty of people around here. I have very few such "utility" programs on my PC, and I'm willing to bet that folks like Joerg, Jim, and John do likewise.

Talk about wasting the company's time... :-)

Sounds reasonable enough, but how do they transfer "results" data back to the corporate network? E-mail themselves? USB thumb drives? Where I am the lab machines have highly-controlled access to the main fileservers, getting to read and write only in a couple of places -- but this is a lot more productive than having to copy 10MB report files to a thumb drive!

I guess I just don't see myself ever hiring people who profess competence in one area but somehow aren't even competent enough to know their own limitations when it comes to another area such as PCs.

Thanks for your advice regarding backup up PCs.

---Joel

Ecnerwal snipped-for-privacy@SOuthernVERmont.NyET posted to sci.electronics.design:

I would have said that a bit differently, more like "i was very impressed, negatively"