On Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:48:09 -0700 Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:
> On 9/17/2012 10:29 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote: > > LOL... I agree with the sentiment. My dad has a pair of Apple II's > > from the 80's, and they still work. He does his accounts on them > > sometimes. Compared to a 3-year-old PC of today, which is probably > > already dying a horrible death of HD failures, fan failures, CPU > > overheating, software breakages that's gotten it into a state that > > requires reformatting and reinstalling to fix. Apparently, this is > > the crowning achievement of 3 decades of software development. > > ?? I don't have such problems with my computers, and I tend to run > them for 5 years before upgrading. The HD failure rate is about the > same as in the 80's. Of course, we no longer have to deal with > floppies that get corrupted often. > > The most common failure I've had are the power supplies, they're > still as bad today as in the 80's. > I went through a few-years-long period where I was constantly replacing failed power supplies. Then I finally decided to splurge on a GOOD one, huge wattage, very reputable company, and at *least* twice the $$$ I'd ever spent on a power supply before. Never had another power supply problem since. (Knock on wood...) One important thing to keep on mind (that I've learned from Tom's Hardware and Sharky Extreme) is that power supply manufacturer apparently lie about their wattages as a regular matter of course. Ie, if it says "X Watts", then you're never going to get it to even about 0.9*X without the stupid thing blowing up. So keep that in mind when shopping. Regarding HDDs, I've sworn I will *never* run a main system again without a GOOD always-on SMART monitor like Hard Disk Sentinel <http://www.hdsentinel.com/>. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I haven't switched my primary OS from Win to Linux yet, because I can't find a good Linux SMART monitor. (Manually running a CLI program - or writing a script to do it - doesn't even remotely count.) Oooh! Actually, now that I've looked up that link, it looks like they do have an early Linux version now. Awesome, I'm gonna have to try that out.
