Time to Upgrade ?:-}

I can't think of any use for one, and that sounds like a good reason to avoid them.

NT

$4,738.21 ?

Socket: LGA2011-v3, Clockspeed: 2.3 GHz, Turbo Speed: 3.6 GHz, No of Cores: 18 (2 logical cores per physical), Max TDP: 145 W

Cheers

Is there even *any* SPICE that's GPU-enabled, yet?

LTSpice is SMP, which is, sad to say: decades ahead of the curve. Considering everyone else is stuck in 1981, or whenever it was XSPICE was released. NI/Multisim, Altium, PSpice(?), take your pick... (NgSpice?) They're all based on that one (free, coincidentally!) SPICE core.

Short of it is, more than two CPU cores (or a fancy GPU, beyond good 2D and good enough 3D performance) doesn't buy you much in EDA these days.

Kind of a bizarre inversion, historically speaking: EDA and CAD used to be the prime driver behind top-of-the-line workstations. 'Course, they cost $100k back then, too. It's been my experience that the mid-level software companies (~$10k/license and down) have been strangely resistant to any kind of advancement or refinement of this sort.

Tim

Photo archive. And the dreaded vacation movies.

Cheers

They would be good for anything you want to keep for more than five years. The Navy ran some tests and estimated the mean time to failure as 1000 years. No reason to avoid them except the media is several dollars per 25 gigabytes.

Dan

I've suffered many a bruised rib courtesy of the wife's elbow... I'm the master at falling asleep instantly on the in-laws' vacation movies ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I've always maintained a hot spare of every system I've used. If something crashes, I can be up and running on another machine within a matter of hours -- or less.

Hardware is cheap. And, if you work like I do (move on to something else instead of waiting for a machine to finish), the "spare" just facilitates that.

I got a new PC on Friday, and I'm going through the awful process of installing all my existing apps and settings and projects and desktop stuff. Old HP XP, new monster Win7 Dell with 4x the ram, 30x the disk, gobs of horsepower. Such a trauma is worth it every 3 years or so, certainly not much more often.

I occasionally run a Spice sim on the old 5-year-old HP that take many minutes per run, so design iterations are slow. That's about the slowest thing I do, and most circuit sims take a second or two. I can spin a SolidWorks 3D model essentially instantly. Doing a design rules check on a big PC board might take 10 seconds, so I don't often need more compute power. Webbing is connection speed limited.

Why does Microsoft keep changing the way Windows works, for no apparent reason? Most annoying.

We backup design releases to CDs, which I store in the cave at home. Some are 10 years old, and I occasionally have to retrieve one. So far, it has always worked.

Presumably you're updating the O/S to at least Win7 64 Pro, so you may lose some peripherals along the way where the drivers were never updated or don't work all that well. Scanners in particular don't seem to survive.

--sp

The hp 3970 scanner is as old as the hills... but it is USB... who knows? ...Jim Thompson

For a "trivial (windows) machine" (e.g., something that just does word processing, web browsing, email, etc.) it usually takes me the better part of three days to get a new machine set up and configured. Rarely do you just reinstall all the same (old) apps: "Hmmm.... should I upgrade Firefox? And, what about the tool that I use to view ISO's? And what's the latest set of Adobe Reader bugs? ..."

My *work* machines take *weeks* to set up! Invariably, something that used to work doesn't any longer. So, time spent (wasted) researching the "why" behind it. Then, deciding if I should "live without" that thing -- or, *risk* upgrading it and hope it doesn't break anything else in the process...

I firmly believe in living with a known set of problems and capabilities instead of seeking out a whole new set! Most of the time, the machine is sitting in a tight loop waiting for me to decide which *key* I'm going to press...

I sure as hell don't need to install "updates" every week and wonder what won't work thereafter -- and *when* I will discover the problem! (most updates are security related; keep machine off the internet and all those problems go away!)

Spinning a model is simple. Photorealistically *rendering* it from a wireframe eats cycles. (I have models of things where you can actually see the detail of the "legs" of components/DIPs in the final model)

Why "new coke"? Why "new and improved" ANYTHING? Esp when the "improvement" rarely *is*!

If Windows Y was the same as Windows X, who would buy Y?

What I found most amusing is reading the numerous papers MSweenies publish touting the rationale behind all of their decisions -- esp user interface decisions! Then, reading the counterparts to those papers at the NEXT release... wherein they have an entirely different rationale for an entirely different user interface dogma! :-/

I have had CD's that were no longer 100 % readable.

Dan

On Sun, 2 Aug 2015 19:05:15 -0700 (PDT), " snipped-for-privacy@krl.org" Gave us:

Hard drives are cheap. Get an mSATA drive and USB drive enclosure and every design directory you ever had can be fully backed up onto a device which reads as fast as your HD subsystems do and will for a long time to come.

Easy greasy Slap-it-in-and-go-soeasy.

Win 8.1 can be made somewhat less awful by making it look like Win 7 using Classic Shell: That brings back the real start menu, ease of adding shortcut icons to the desktop, and explorer usability. I can totally ignore the page of wiggly icons that MS calls a start page.

Agreed. I haven't seen a bad Intel CPU in probably 15 years, while I've lost count of the dead or erratic AMD CPU's that have I've had to deal with. I would go with a 4th or 5th generation i7. The i7-4790k is about $330 and burns about 45 watts, while the i7-5960x is $1,000 and burns 140 watts. That should make the decision easy.

In general, an SSD is 3x to 5x faster than rotating memory for everything. I'm partial to Samsung 850 EVO and Pro. Most SSD drives have similar read speeds. However, the write speeds is what makes the difference. There are benchmark tests all over the internet. Don't overbuy on capacity as the prices of SSD drives are still dropping and you can probably do better if you wait until you need the space.

I had problems with a Crucial MX100 512MB. The drive was fine, but no matter what I tried, it would not boot in the designated HP i7 something machine, even with a fresh Win 8 install. However, it worked in another machine (Dell Inspiron 1725) so I kept it. Also, the write speed is slower than a Samsung 850 SSD.

I must be leading a charmed life. I've installed (cloned) about 25 assorted SSD drives in the last year. Lately, I'm doing 2 pre-emptive SSD upgrades per week and climbing. Zero failures or irate customers so far and no indications of impending doom.

However, I did have some problems with Samsung 840 series which was later fixed with a firmware update. I also had some problems with a user that did not properly shut down his desktop, preferring instead to just switch off the power. He was scrambling data on the SSD until I discovered the power problem. Demonstrating how to operate the power button (i.e. push once to shut down) solved that problem.

I don't have any great advice on what to buy. If you want reliability, buy two machines. If you want performance, buy the latest greatest. If you want to save money, buy last years model. If you want reparability, buy an off the shelf Dell workstation. If you want it all, give up now while you're still sane and solvent.

Most of my customer initially want the fastest speed and the latest features. After those fail, they ask for reliability and uptime. Try not to repeat this pattern and buy something that you know will work, not that has the latest acronyms and buzzwords attached.

To give the illusion of progress and improvement. If they left the user interface the same, users will think it really is the same and refuse to pay for upgrades. Users will pay for new features and functions, but balk at paying for bug fixes and cleanup. So, any new upgrades that cost money must look and work different in order to sell.

Microsoft has apparently recognized the problem and will soon offer a solution. Instead of being a user, you will soon be a subscriber to the MS dollars for updates service. Instead of paying a lump sum for the OS with the machine, you will pay a regular service charge for the honor of using Windoze, much like Office 365. Updates will be "pushed" directly to your machine whenever MS feels the need and without your consent. The good news is that there will no longer be any need for MS to sell bug fixes and tweaks disguised as progress and improvements. It's therefore possible that the annoying user interface changes and "Dungeons and Dragons" program location moves may be at an end.

If you don't like the Win 8.1 user interface, I suggest you look at Classic Shell:

It's easier with a Macintosh. Just boot the old machine holding down the 'T' key and it becomes a Firewire external drive. Link Firewire from old machine to new, and on the new one, run the Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant. Except for a game or two (which give 'reinstall from original media' messages), it just works. Doesn't Windows have a similar utility?

Have you considered opening a computer museum?

HP Scanner driver and software support for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Nope... not listed as supported.

HP Scanjet - Scanners not supported in Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 Yep... officially listed as not supported.

Some friends just returned from a month in Spain walking the Camino de Santiago. They brought back the usual mix of movies, stills, and souveniers. In order for me to get a free dinner, I expected to be tortured by a narrated account of the walk in excruciating detail. Instead, all the dinner guests were presented with a free 4GB flash drive crammed full of pictures, movies, sounds, and scans, and were invited to take them home to view them. Included on the flash drive were some Mac and PC slide show and movie viewing software. There was also an LED projection display available to help with the after dinner discussions. I was impressed as were the other guests. You might suggest this method to the in-laws.