Comments for sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/post/it-s-a-boat-anchor

Comment #526

2007-10-26T22:39:03Z

I note that Gateway is second from the bottom....

Comment #525

2007-10-26T12:37:10Z

Thought you might find this interesting. I guess you shouldn't buy a Dell either.

http://www.courant.com/hc-watchdog1026.artoct26,0,3588245.story

Comment #524

2007-09-27T13:05:35Z

Many thanks to you all. Your comments are most informative, especially since they don't all agree. :)

David, you're not too late; I'm notoriously slow at making this kind of decision, especially when I have a work-around that works on a temporary basis (the laptop). But it needs to be done.

As you know, we WERE loyal Gateway fans, and had found their machines extremely reliable. But the company has changed.

Jon, I love the idea of getting a computer from Chris in a standard case using whatever he can from our old one, and having lots of room for expansion and RAID and other cool things. And of course a week in Pittsburgh is attractive for many reasons! I'm not ready to give up Windows altogether, though. Too many of my applications depend on it, and I don't want to try to find work-arounds, at least not yet. I'll e-mail you with more questions about the possibilities.

Comment #523

2007-09-22T01:07:53Z

Well, I am obviously late for the party but I thought I would add my two cents.

My initial thought while reading your article was that you needed to go ahead and invest in building yourself a new computer. The obvious benefit to this strategy is that you can scale as you feel appropriate---a large case capable of supporting RAID and any number of other upgrades; parts you select so future swap outs are on your terms; the opportunity to use some of the peripherals and hardware you already have; and innumerable other positive features.

I must also state that as a fellow customer of Gateway, one that was, in fact is extremely pleased with the enduring performance of a once-great but now aging system, I am extremely put off by this and another recent negative experience with the cow box people.

Best of luck what whatever plan you inevitably select. Oh, and thank you again for the poor man’s cake. It was delicious!

Comment #522

2007-09-21T15:33:24Z

If you get a "regular" desktop machine, it is pretty easy to replace parts one by one. Every once in a while a new standard comes out that makes it harder to just replace one part, but pretty rarely, and there are almost always ways around it. The only example I can think of at the moment is when the power supplies changed from AT to ATX, that made it so the motherboards, power supplies and cases had to be replaced all at once.

Once the switchover to ATX happened (10 years ago?), I have used the same size cases - and the only reason that is plural, is that I bought a Dell from Sidd, so it wasn't compatible with a regular motherboard, so I had to buy a new case when Josh bought me a new motherboard.

When the RAM or processors change sizes, it can sometimes be hard to find the older sizes, though as in Grandpa Wightman's case, it sometimes is easy to replace broken parts with stuff other people think is junk, since it is so old.

I wouldn't think an external drive is important - hard drives haven't changed sizes in 20 years. SATA drives are now becoming more standard instead of IDE, although there are still conversion kits you can get if you had the wrong type for your motherboard.

I expect a computer to last 5 to 10 years. The computer I bought in college (used) is now 12 years old, and I am not sure if I am going to have it run our phones, or give it to goodwill - it still runs fine. Josh gave me a motherboard maybe 4 years ago, so I upgraded, but it was to a relatively slow processor (800Mhz Duron), so that won't have as much life as the previous computer, and I have been wondering whether it would be good to replace the motherboard and processor in it to get faster machine. There are a maybe three hard drives in the system, but one or two of them were bought in the mid-nineties. I did buy a new hard drive at one point when one of them had some trouble, but haven't needed it yet.

I am likely to have RAIDed hard drives if I ever upgrade - it is great knowing that a hard drive can completely fail and not lose one bit of data. And it isn't that expensive to do RAID5 - I purchased some hard drives yesterday: $210 for 750GB (1TB at RAID5), plus the RAID card, which I will buy since it is for Lime Daley, but it isn't necessary for a home computer. (oh, and I was happy to see that the hard drives have a 5 year warranty - I thought all of the manufacturers had dropped to one year warranties, but Seagate still has a five year warranty)

I have a USB-to-2.5"-IDE drive converter, which is handy for bringing large amounts of data around in my pocket, but I wouldn't want to run my computer off an external drive, I think. I'd expect the heat dissipation is worse for a non-fan external drive, so lowering its life. Though if you wanted to go that route, I don't know of any applications that wouldn't run off an external drive.

I think you should get a computer from Chris in a standard case, using whatever parts from your current computer that you can, and then come spend a week in Pittsburgh installing Debian and learning how it works. The world is becoming increasingly less dependent on Microsoft, so I think you could end up being happy with a non-Microsoft system, and the benefits that gets you. One side benefit that might not be obvious to a non-Microsoft system is that the hardware can be significantly less powerful, and so that contributes to longer lasting hardware - ie. I used a 200Mhz processor until three or four years ago, and was fairly happy, and I am more of a power user than most. And the 800Mhz processor (640MB RAM) runs Linux faster or at least comparable to my 2.2Ghz processor (1.5GB RAM) running XP at work. And my 2Ghz processor (768MB RAM) XP laptop isn't even close.

Well, this seems like this is probably my own blog post by now...

Comment #521

2007-09-20T19:09:25Z

LimeDaley is great! Part of my backup plan includes burning DVD's to store offsite, that is, at someone else's house...which in our particular case you could say is a special LimeDaley service. :)

Comment #520

2007-09-20T18:36:00Z

Yeah, I suppose a DVD burner is the sort of thing I had in mind. But since you already own an internal one you might as well install it in your next machine if it fits and the box doesn't come with one built in. But for any future add-on purchases, prefer the external option if available.

I don't know about Microsoft. They might prevent you from installing their stuff on an external drive and then using it elsewhere. If so, just use an open-source alternative.

In addition to using an external drive for all your important data, I recommend keeping offsite backups. I'm not sure what the best solution for that is. For my photos I'm using FlickR, and some other stuff is on LimeDaley.

Comment #519

2007-09-20T17:06:29Z

Would you give examples of what you mean by "extras"? I'm not sure what I can relegate to external drives. Somehow I imagine Microsoft would make it impossible to have the software exclusively on a portable drive....

Or did you mean peripherals like DVD burners? If I could make my formerly internal drives work externally, I wouldn't feel so bad about the boat anchor.

Comment #518

2007-09-20T16:33:08Z

I wouldn't really expect to replace a computer every year, but I want to be ready at any time. Having my data and all the "extras" as separate items that can easily migrate to a new machine is the way to go. A machine might last 1 year, or 10 (Poisson distribution?). Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

Comment #517

2007-09-20T13:55:58Z

Thanks, Peter and Janet. That's a scary thought -- expect to replace your computer every year? You're talking to someone who drives a 15-year-old car. And hates shopping.

On the other hand, I am looking forward to ways of "holding my computer more loosely" and not being so dependent on one particular machine or system. I'm a long way from that, but this whole situation is making me think about it.

Comment #516

2007-09-19T15:24:19Z

[[[[[[Mom]]]]]]

Comment #515

2007-09-19T15:20:15Z

I once replaced a 4-year-old Gateway motherboard (the original computer was about $2000, back in 1993) and the new one didn't fit in the case. I just used it with the case slightly open. For a few months. Then I got rid of it and didn't own a computer for several years, since I had one in my office that someone else would fix when it broke.

My advice? Get a cheap new (or used) computer and plan to replace it about when its warranty runs out. Keep all your data on an external drive so moving is relatively painless. I don't like this answer because replacing hardware often is so wasteful (toxic waste, too!) but they just don't make computers that will last a long time, at least not at the consumer level. Perhaps that will change someday, but I don't see the motivating factors lining up in that direction anytime soon.