What to buy?

I use an ml350 compaq for the same reasons and removable pack drives for backup on other pc's. Far better performance than average and if a single drive goes down, drop in another without powering down and the raid controller rebuilds it in the background while I get on with some work :-).

An ml350 G4 is twin xeon 3Ghz, 6 drive slots and raid controller, 800 Mhz fsb, ecc and interleaved memory, additional on board scsi, video and networking and price in the uk less than 50 ukp including drives if you shop around. More than fast enough for software development and much more besides.

G5 series are even better, but more recent and far more expensive...

Regards,

Chris

Most HD's have SMART they will inform you if parameters are degrading. This just happened to my sister she booted her PC and a pop-up came up "your hard drive is about to fail backup all data etc?".

There are tools to check your drive HDSentinel.

HDSentinel will show/monitor you your SMART parameters and alert you if a failure is imminent.

Who knows it may just be loose mounting screws.

I see the same thing over here, US. The "deals" that might induce me to buy dry up around Christmas (especially retail computer stores), and they are less likely to give you "extras." There are one or two Internet companies that are taking the economic downturn more seriously and are offering better values, but I'm programmed to wait until a month after Christmas for better deals.

Some of the schools flood the market with "off lease" machines around then too.

I think I would hold out for an i7 triple-channel (LGA-1366) with 12G of RAM. Maybe with Win7 64-bit. Should cost $4K* (< $3K if you don't care too much about bleeding edge 3D video performance for CAD applications). I'd go with a bit slower CPU/RAM than the bleeding edge and a really good PSU. Since I'd do a fresh install of everything software, it only makes about 1 hour difference between buying it set up and buying the parts (my little Hitachi electric torque-limited screwdriver makes quick work of building a PC). But it's less stressful to use a clone shop because if anything turns out to be DOA or incompatible, they deal with the return hassles. Newegg is great for a parts source-- I use them all the time.

If performance/$ is more important, maybe an i5 with some AALS hard drives and a decent amount of RAM.

• for the past two decades, the computer I "want" always has cost ~K. Sometimes I get the .5K one, sometimes more the high end, but the top end one is very consistently in that range, +/-20%. Strange.

Well, it's been "vibrating" for more than a month... I suspect noisy bearings.

But it is backed-up ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Yes. I decided to have a computer at our family cabin in the mountains. I just pulled one C: drive at work (no effort at all... pop out one RAID drive on the front panel, pop in a blank) and plugged it into a new machine, then added a second blank drive there too. The BIOS handles it all. Everything is identical, everything works. Just had to tweak a couple of mail settings and hide some network drive icons.

Cheap computers aren't worth it.

John

Depends if you enjoy the tinkering and do the research on what you are buying :-). Computing is a major interest here, so it's part of the process to configure and do maintenance, in much the same way that I buy test gear cheap and restore it. I never, ever buy new computers, as it doesn't make economic sense to me at all. One to three year old, top end of the manufacturers range machines are always the best tradeoff between perfomance and overall cost of ownership, imhe.

The old proliant series are brilliant machines though and they just seem to keep on going forever...

Regards,

Chris

On everything but the lowest of the low-end machines (e.g., netbooks), it seems like pretty much all the manufacturers install the 64-bit version of Windows 7. (I mean, even 2GHz Celeron laptops are getting 64-bit Win7!) I'm kinda surprised, although I suppose they figure the memory and performance impact is small enough these days that it's better to have the extra "elbow room" that 64-bits gets you...

---Joel

It might be a bit easier if you can define search criteria that yanks everything from "mechanical devices" and "electronic stuff" to then spit it out in the "general use" library, but it's kinda hard to say for certain.

The whole idea of "special folders" that began in Windows 95 makes some sense when a machine has multiple users, but for single-user installations I always figured that just creating directories off the root (e.g., c:\\Documents) was just as good as dealing with a "My Documents" folder that happened to map to c:\\Docs and Settings\\Joel\\My Docs.

In general I believe that the Windows 7 library business will probably be largely ignored by, say, 80% of users, and of the remaining 20% I wouldn't yet want to predict how many will benefit from it vs. finding it far annoying than useful -- I only have one Win7 machine to mess around with and haven't made the time to play with it enough yet.

---Joel

=A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

"I can see Windows 7 from my house..." -Sarah Palin

Care is advised :-). The dell I bought this year had an xp 64 bit coa on the case, but eventually installed 32 bit version since most (all?) 32 bit apps won't run at all on the 64 bit version, according to various sources I looked at.

Unless you need the address space, it's arguably a waste of time for most applications...

Regards,

Chris

"Most" 32-bit apps are *supposed* to work on the 64-bit version of Win 7 (and Vista). It seems to work fine for me for, e.g., CAD tools/office productivity stuff/etc., but I'm sure there's plenty of software that runs "closer to the hardware" that doesn't fare so well. (And of course they added all the DRM stuff so anything trying to playback, e.g., DVDs probably doesn't work by default.)

They did completely remove support for 16-bit applications (Windows 3.1) in the 64-bit versions of Vista and Win 7. The Microsoft "solution for people who still need these old apps is the XP compatibility (vitural machine) mode. I.e., load up another entire OS at the weight of perhaps a gigabyte to run some old 500kB app. :-)

Agreed, but apparently the thinking is that there's no end in sight to software bloat, so pretty soon you will need the address space, like it or not!

---Joel

I'm running a 3.1Ghz AMD Phenom 2 and it's still not fast enough for my LTspice smps simulations. :( I'm considering overclocking.

In message , ChrisQ writes

Surely you missed a few hundred off that price? If not where the hell are you buying them from and would you buy a couple for me?

In message , Joerg writes

I'm writing this message in a virtual XP machine on windows 7, it's really rather good, nice and responsive, seems very reliable so far. Win

Somewhere close to 70 now over 7 years now and I've had very few hardware problems, they've been extremely reliable I've only replaced a couple of PSUs so far.

In message , ChrisQ writes

Compaq is now the low end consumer grade brand of HP. Avoid.

Yea, but..sometimes the drive dies within 30 seconds after the message...

Given the space between modern hard drive tracks its hard to see how it could vibrate enough to make noise and not have read problems - at least not with a spindle bearing out of whack enough to vibrate the HD case.

I assume you checked the obvious stuff like fans.

I saw a new HP with XP today too, I only noticed it was an HP because it had hosed a perfectly good database due to filesystem issues.

possibly caused by bad ram, dunno, not my problem.