PC components must become idiot proof and high warranty.

High warranty I certainly agree with you on but PC components being idiot proof I'm not so sure.

The problem is the average person hasn't got the experience or the knowledge to be inside a PC chassis. If you want to maintain warranty then you need to take ESD precautions, which most people won't know or even care about. The only way for extended warranty is to keep people out of the guts and ensure work is carried out by professionals.

I personally don't rely on system warranty, I generally buy individual components and construct the system myself. The only failures I've suffered have been HDD related.

Lightweight devices are great, I currently have a home server which does all my processing for media serving, etc. around the house. I use Atom based custom devices to access the media (XBMC) which works very well.

Pete

Quotes:

"It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious." --RobertHeinlein

"Those who try to build idiot-proof systems always underestimate the persistence and ingenuity of idiots." --anon

"If you make your system more idiot-proof the idiots will build a bigger idiot" --anon

"You can make something foolproof, but not damnfoolproof" --anon

HTH. (But I doubt it...)

Idiot proof is clearly impossible, but I've always thought that IC pins should be physically asymmetric. Lately, all you get is some subtle part marking, lasered and only visible at certain angles, to tell which one of four orientations is correct. We buy one part that has its orientation mark on the bottom.

Tubes couldn't be plugged in wrong, but ICs can.

There's not much point in building your own PC, when you can get one all assembled and working, with warranty, cheap nowadays.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

Sure they could. Bent pins, or a missing keyway. I saw it in many DIY hack jobs that ended up in the shop. The least likely to be put in wrong were the very early 4, 5, 6, & 7 pin large base tubes but even those designs didn't keep idiots from breaking sockets while trying to insert them in the wrong orientation.

Well, you could hammer a tube into its socket, or break off the keyway, but most radio/TV tubes were hard to get in wrong.

Octals were great; you could get them in right by feel, in places you could reach but not see.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

Building my own gear isn't just about cost, its something I enjoy doing. I also have some fairly obscure requirements which aren't catered for in the average off the shelf PC.

Idiots didn't need a hammer. They could destroy most things with their bare hands. Like the one that came into the shop with a PC mount can capacitor out of a car radio, with a chunk of phenolic circuit board attached and wanted to by a new vibrator for his radio. he didn't believe it wasn't a vibrator and screamed, "You #$%^&* idiots! My daddy used to fix his car radios and it was always a bad vibrator!"

The thin plastic keyways would deteriorate and fall off, without even removing the tubes. Or swell and break off when you tried to remove the tube. Then you had to break it out in pieces to install the new tube.

Try peddling this to people who didn't repair tube based electronics for a few decades.

Like me! I have no idea what you guys are talking about ha ha

I didn't dip into computer mods until the later days of IDE, SATA rules!

Extra credit to the do-it-thyself repairmen who soldered the octal sockets with the tube still in the socket. Extracting the tube tended to be umm.... difficult. I still have this problem with industrial control systems that use octal socket relays.

What's wrong with this picture? Spoiler: The four big electrolytics are soldered in backwards. Why? Because on every other PCB, the silkscreen marks the negative pin with a big white blob to match the big wide white stripe on the electrolytic can. Not this PCB, where a better idiot marked the postitive pin on the PCB. A few weeks later, I was again not paying attention (or was wearing the wrong eyeglasses), and repeated the same mistake.

Drivel: Design News magazine has a column called "Made by Monkeys" which highlights stupid product design errors. When I want to be truly disgusted, I read product liability litigation cases and claims. You did what with our product?

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Beating my head against the wall is something I enjoy doing because it feels so good when I stop.

Ok, you have a computah related fetish. Overclocking, video rendering and speed for gaming, hardware decoding for pirated movies, no fans, liquid cooling, multiple monitor flight simulators, render farming, faster programming, etc. The list of non-mainstream applications grows every day. I guess if I had a fetish, it would be maximum uptime and reliability. My customers pay me for it. Oddly, I do better modifying packaged systems, than buy building something from scratch.

In audio, such a fetish would label you an audiophile. In computing, you would perhaps be a computerfile.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

We always put a + sign on the silk. Our people are able to figure out that the - marked side of the cap doesn't solder to the + sign side on the board.

My Audi sure deserves to be in that list. The controls are incredibly dumb, clumsy, and dangerous.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

Just give SkyDuck a tube and watch him.

Laptops are the way to go anymore.

Kinda cool idea to have such a thing in the house... the industrial cabinet...

One thing I wonder about is:

How does the cooling work ?

I haven't fully examined the PDF yet ?! ;) :)

I just ordered new replacement hardware to fix my DreamPC and upgrade my old Pentium III 450 mhz with 2 GB of memory ! ;) :0

But that's all I will say about it for now ;) some of those components in short supply, so keeping my fingers crossed that the order will go through ! ;) :) =D

If all goes well then tomorrow the new stuff will arrive...

Then I will first upgrade my PIII 450 mhz... to see if that will work... should be nice to breath some new life into this machine... the processor will be slow... but at least the rattling will be reduced to an absolute minimum... hopefully the system won't die on me any time soon ! ;) :) This is my backup computer... I am actually enjoying it quite nicely...

It's amazing to see how it can actually power a 1920x1200 monitor via vga without any problems... I can't even notice the difference with hdmi... which is amazing... almost makes me wonder why hdmi was ever invented... probably for sound or so...

I shall make some nice pictures of my soon to be systems... I put the PIII

450 mhz in the chieftec case where my previous DreamPC was in... it's really cool.

And it's quite nice having a lownoise system... I really missed sitting behind my PIII 450 mhz and Windows XP Pro ;) :) The lowness is reaaaaallly cool. And it feels reliable... though sometimes during boot the processor might do weird things and go to bios 66 mhz or so... but so far so good ;) (Probably some kind of surge related or so... not sure).

The quantum fireball does feel somewhat slow but so far so good... I wish I could run linux mint on it to check for bad sectors... but it don't support this old pentium III... I can probably find another tool to check for bad sectors... maybe there are none who knows ;)... glad I didn't kill it ;) like I did the other old drive... I regret that a bit, but kicking it was kinda fun anyway lol.

Am I crazy to upgrade this old machine ? I don't know... but the rattling was pissing me off a bit... 256 MB ram just not enough... for just 100+ bucks I can have 2 GB ram for it... seems like a pretty good deal to me. I am just hoping it will fit... the picture didn't seem like it... I am just hoping that picture was wrong... 168 pins sdram should have 2 holes/cuts right ? hmmm...

Bye, Skybuck.

Buying a whole sale PC at some local shop or webshop would simply not be an option for me.

I have very sentitive data on my PC and I dont want anybody to take a look at it.

So sending a broken PC back to the store is simply not an option and might lead to even more damage to critical parts like HD's...

And I doubt taking those out would go well with those shops.

Another reason for building my own is so that I know how it works and can upgrade it when necessary like now... and fix it... like now...

Unfortunately it does come with problems/mistakes/damages/etc.

In the past I did buy PC's from local stores... and the mostly the case sucked bad... and led problems.. wobbly cheap aluminium cases... not saying that aluminum is bad persee... but those cases just bad layouts...

By building my own I get to chery pick good/handy components.

I am still in doubt how I will fix my DreamPC... (I ordered 2 motherboards).

I have a couple of options:

1. Go back to SLI with two 7900 GTX graphics cards for good direct 9.0 gaming/windows/graphics. Though I dont enjoy games as much anymore... so not that important.

1. Combine one 7900 GTX card with a GT 520 direct 11 card so I can do cuda programming... I am interested in cuda programming... not sure if this setup will work and if it's wise... the 7900 GTX might still get hot..

2. I will probably go with the GT 520 inside of it... and leave the 7900 GTX's out of it... I will keep those cards for the far future...

When I buy a new PC in the far future... which would be/might have better cuda support... I could then take out the cuda card from the old computer/dream pc and replace it with the two 7900 gtx cards so the old computer can still be a good gaming system... or perhaps graphics system for something special or so... however if it would die that would still be a shame... However if I put graphics cards in it then... I might not know how it performs because I didnt test it expensively...

All I know is I don't want to loose my current system... the motherboards I ordered seem really nice... and have lots of backwards compatibility with older systems and hardware which is really nice. These are supposed to be good stable quality motherboards. It's even an sli motherboard ;) :)

Me looking forward to bringing my DreamPC back online which will probably be tomorrow or the day after that...

Hopefully this will be my last upgrade to this PC so it's ready for my Canon PowerShot SX 50 HS....

I hope to never have to touch the insides ever again... and I will probably keep the additional motherboard as a backup in case anything ever goes wrong again... these motherboards are very hard to find lately... so I should keep it as backup and not do any more experimenting...

I am done with experimenting for now... My DreamPC must last until 2016... at least that was the plan... so it lasted 10 years since I bought it ;)

Next time my budget should be half of what I spent on the DreamPC so I can upgrade sooner... my budget is probably 2.500 euro for a PC which should last 5 years... maybe a little bit more 3.000 euro but that's it ! ;) We = me+dad used to spent 6000 dutch gulders on a PC... so nowadays that's roughly 3000 euros... so I think that's fair.

Me looking forward to all the new instructions added to new processors... intel x86/x64 and arm too.

Don't know yet what my next processor will be... probably an intel... since this dreampc turned out to be a nightmare... maybe amd has something to do with that... me not sure... so maybe next PC I will go back to intel components as much as possible... though my older systems didn't necessarily use intel components but other brands and they also still work...

Maybe an arm processor in future/2016... who knows ;)

Kinda funny to think about it ;) :)

Though I have noticed the AMD X2 3800+ dual core processor does start to lag a tiny little bit with web browsing... but not too bad. Could also be GT 520 related... could be interesting to replace with older 7900 GTX which is much faster to see if the gt 520 caused the slowdown...

Also the ordered motherboards have integrated graphics which is also nice for cuda development... so it seems like a really sweet deal for me ! ;)

But I am not telling yet where I ordered it, or what I ordered... cause I dont want other people to snatch it away from me ! ;) :)

Hopefully by the time people read this mail it will be to late to try and snatch it away ! lol ;) :)

So tomorrow or the day I get my stuff... I will reveal what I bought ! ;) :)

I saw those motherboards back in 2006 or so... or 2009 or something... I think I wrote postings about it... will be most amuzing to try and find my postings and reads those back what I thought about it back then ! ;) :) =D

Bye, Skybuck.

Thanks for explaining how it vents.... I might look into something like that... but how many racks do you plan on putting in there ? and how much watt will it suck from the wall ? and how do you cope with 1800 watt limits or so ? Or you haven't figured that out yet ? ;) :)

Would be nice to have 10.000 watts of power or so ;) :) but expensive ? ;) :)

Anyway.. I already looked at those atoms... and integrated onto a motherboard... very tempting to buy one of those... but it doesn't come with memory... so would have to buy that... and then it gets somewhat expensive...

Also perhaps it's somewhat to limited, perhaps to few satas or perhaps vga only, or perhaps integrated graphics too limited...

I am a software programmer and I like CUDA... so an integrated motherboard with CUDA would be cool. That would make it much more interesting for me.

Also I like keeping old systems alive so I can test how my or other software behaves on old systems...

Virtual Machines simply don't cut that mosterd... because they don't do full emulation... there is always something missing... or bugs/etc.

So nothing beats real hardware LOL ;) :)

Ofcourse nowadays everybody goes along with the trend towards new software... windows 7/windows8 and backwards compatibility doesn't seem like a big deal... but I for one am glad that my old hardware still functions... it's kinda cool....

If ever a disaster happens which whipes out newer hardware... and doesnt affect old hardware... then I am good to go ! LOL ;) :)

My appartment is getting a bit full with boxes... and hardware though... especially boxes... I keep those around just in case for warranty issues... or perhaps selling in future... or perhaps in 50 years they might be worth a lot... if I still live then ;)

Perhaps people will start collecting those things... just like baseball cards... who knows ;) All I know is I kinda like it ;) :)

A bit crazy perhaps... but not reallllly. Oh well. I will probably stack up those boxes until it hits the roof ! ;) :)

Also only 2gb for the atom seems somewhat limited... it won't be future proof/ready...

For future anything less than 2 GB would make me a bit nervous... 2GB ok for now me thinks... but for the years ahead... 4 GB probably better ;)

Though maybe 2 GB might still cut the mosterd... perhaps there are 4 GB chips which can go into those two slots...

That passively cooled CPU does look sweet though... makes my mouth water ! :)

Perhaps such a thing should be mounted on a full blown motherboard... that I'll be cool and turn some heads ! ;)

Bye, Skybuck.

So the big thing/rack ? is only for special rack equipment ? or can it house anything ? I am guessing just special rack equipment ?

I also guess you are acquinted to racks because of your work ? ;)

My Canon PowerShot SX 50 HS digital camera can record 1920x1200 for about 30 minutes... then it must press the record button again... I will probably upload a hack kit to remove that limitation.

I am very interested in 1920x1200 video... and beyond... just because of the technical challenges of it.

Also for ufo spotting/recording purposes LOL...

I am also interested in lossless video....

Full HD I am not sure what that means... there is also HD... usually indicated by 720p and such...

720p is nice for youtube and smooth play... the GT 520 can do 720p... but it does stutter a bit at 1080p... not sure why... maybe it's even the cpu... though adobe flash player does claim to have hardware acceleration... I don't know exactly what kind... but they probably mean gpu acceleration... perhaps it said gpu acceleration I don't know...

I think I once watched predator movie in blueray format... so I think the system can actually do blueray ok... that was quite a cool experience...

So if I really want to watch 1080p youtube videos smoothly then one possible solution could be to download it with a youtube downloader and watch it with a native player.

Though it would be very nice to watch youtube videos at 1080p smoothly all the time... I estimate the gt520 and/or amd x2 3800+ achieves about 15 fps via adobe flash player... maybe 20 fps.. but it's a bit too slow for my taste... I notice it at least ;)

It would be kinda funny/amazing and stupid at the same time if an atom or tablet would achieve the same playback speed as my DreamPC lol ;) :)

At least with my DreamPC I might upgrade it in the future to do better video ;) but for now I am content with what it can do ;)

As long as websurfing goes somewhat smooth I'll be happy... hopefully web developers don't read this otherwise they might start slowing it down even more ! ;) :) Bah ! :) I hope no "Web-Conspiracy" is going on ! ;)

For now I think the outlook is fine, for my dreampc as well at atoms probably... so no real reason to buy a new PC for me just yet ;) except maybe using new instructions... but I can do that in the future... no rush ! ;) :)

Bye, Skybuck.

Good idea, if you have an open PCI-E slot.

That depends on the purpose for which you intend to use it.

For a self impotent dork like you, who only reads emails with them, a simple netbook would be sufficient. So, not much point, as you say.

For most BASIC PC needs, that would work. HOWEVER, if you actually want CPU intensive processes to take place faster, and you want a fast video card set-up, you still assemble with hot, new mainstream parts, and you do NOT go buy a cheap box with a year old OEM MOBO in it, and nothing in the chipset or other MOBO design aspects to make it run better.

So there are still plenty of folks who put together their own, hot running PCs, and there is still plenty of reason to do so. The main one being TIME.

My current machine was built 8 years ago, but keeps up. Had I bought a "cheap" $600 box back then, it would likely not even be Windows 7 capable, and would certainly not be able to play a modern game like the one I did build still can, albeit barely so.

So, my current, new build is the final replacement for me in my late years. I am up over $1000 and I haven't even bought the CPU, MOBO or RAM yet.

I have 4 or 5 "cheap" PCs of the type you tout. They do video home theater, etc., and I have a cheap, $400 laptop with an i3 on it. But they cannot play modern games, and cannot do circuit sims or trace routings anywhere near as fast as even my old box can. That says a lot. It is like fast food burgers compared to artisan restaurant burgers. Even with the same meat in them, there is a world of difference in "performance" ('flavor' in this case).

But there is no "cheap" 'already done up" PC out there even now that can compete with my 8 year old box. You have to spend the amount they want for the higher end stuff, you were not talking about. For those dollars, I CAN indeed build my own, better and cheaper. And my boxed Intel CPU still has its THREE year warranty.

So I do not know what folks are pissing and moaning about. The "warranty" that comes with those pre-builts isn't even as long, and your failure will NOT be "due to a manufacturing defect" so you WILL pay for the service after all anyway.

So for your lame emails an off the shelf POS will work. For those of us who want a PC which actually gets CPU intensive processes done faster, and operates smoother at all times, your "choice" is not one, and the monetary differential is very much so worth it, as my time and comfort are more important than saving a few hundred and buying a POS that simply barely slogs along.

And it is not just a Windows thing either. The shit boxes run Linux notably slower too.

I'll spend the few hundred extra, and slog along faster and more comfortably, thanks.