Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs paper

[mariushm]

It was published in April 2011 but I only found about it today:

Cycles, Cells and Platters: An Empirical Analysis
of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs



It's a very informative paper about where errors occurred in a million pcs microsoft had access to.

[bigbeark]

Re: Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs paper

The only statistic that surprised me was that desktops are less reliable
than laptops!

I guess newer desktops are being built to much lower standards than they used to be.

I have used many obsolete desktops in the past few years and all have been completely reliable.

I have seen the insides of the new Lenovo desktops that are made to resemble the the old IBM Think Centre P4s. Crap caps abound. I guess the manufacturers are looking at the desktop as an obsolete platform and are trying to kill it off!

[Topcat]

Re: Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs paper

^
I think they want us all on phones and tablets....and I'll pass on both for my internet appliance. Phones are great for making calls and texting, and tablets are cute gadgets for the kiddies, but otherwise useless.... The desktop won't be obsolete anytime soon.

[mariushm]

Re: Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs paper

I think the laptops vs desktops might be related to how they're actually used.

I'm not sure if they normalized the data, if it isn't I would guess the laptops in general are used less for intensive work, they throttle down the cpu when idle, there's less disk and memory access compared to regular desktops.

They found a correlation between cpu and memory errors and other factors.

They also found that OEM desktops were better than the other desktops... I would put it in the same category. Most OEM computers are probably bought by companies and used during regular schedules or they're bought by people who are less tech savvy and just use them for iTunes and so on.

I still have to read the paper more thoroughly, I just skimmed through it.