Re: The Future of the Desktop PC

Where is your Cloud data? Who else is looking at it? Yes, make it easy for the NSA... What happens when the cloud provider goes bankrupt or gets shutdown? Yep, your data goes to digital #ell. Not that it matters to a 'ignorant' public that doesn't backup their fail prone drive anyway. For those people a cloud service is a better bet to keep pics of fluffy around. Till they forget to pay the bill and watch their data get expensive or told to go pound sand because the service will not pull a backup tape for them.

Then again who really...

We had a mixed raid assembly that had Seagate and Toshiba 146GB SAS drives. All of a sudden our backup time more than doubled. Like from 6 to 12 hours. After fighting it awhile we dug into the controller logs and found that the Toshiba MBE2147RC SAS drives with F/W D906 (Dell) had a lot of constant media errors. Not all drives but more than half of them with less than 2 years of use. No errors on the Seagate drives.

We replaced the Toshiba drives with errors showing up in the logs and still had long backup times. Finally we replaced all the Toshiba MBE2147RC drives in the array and...

Re: Any Major PC maker doing better than Dell for continuing issues with bad caps?

Looks like the plan of Minitower cases or one step below that, still larger cases sizes, is the best solution for longer life simply by running cooler. At this stage of the game it is has to be a heat related end of life event. High hours and high heat esp. with the additional heat from the video card. The minimal life components do not help.

We recently implemented WOL and power save software. This will sleep the PC's and likely result in longer life as the systems will be cool for...

Re: Any Major PC maker doing better than Dell for continuing issues with bad caps?

The Ultra Small Form Factor Microwave ovens were OptiPlex GX620.

Re: Any Major PC maker doing better than Dell for continuing issues with bad caps?

They make cap kits for these models for a reason... So it isn't luck: it is the shoddy Dell cooling design and cap selection. Lets take hot air off the CPU to cool most of the MB...

The CPU fan needs to exaust from the case (rather than intake like most systems are) or be completely separate airflow without heating up the rest of the PC case.

We also add upgraded video cards so I am sure that adds some extra heat to the case.

Even the 490's were warrantied...

I want to know if HP is doing any better than Dell in the last 5 years for getting 6 years out of a system without having cap guts splattered all over the inside of the PC? Maybe another major brand is doing well?


I have been through the pain of swapping GX270 boards out, then the video cap popped, and finally other caps near the NIC popped on the 3rd go around. All the 270's and 280's have been purged from our company, but, the issue continues...


The bad news is the Ultra Small Form factor "microwave oven" systems that...