Just bought a PC

[billbenson]

I'm on email lists for 3 different online computer hardware stuff. There was a bare bones kit for $200 today. Dual Core Intel processor, 500G HD, 3G ram 64 bit motherboard. I added in a DVD RW cpu heatsink / fan and a HD cooler and it came to $309 plus tax. You have to put it together but there are some deals out there. I didn't do it at the time, but I'm going to order a second HD as well. I like to keep data on the big drive and the operating systems on the C drive and do Image backups of C.

So for under $400 I should have a machine that is pretty much configured the way I want it except it's not a quad processor and I can add that later. Can't beat the price.

[Evan]

Hey Bill -- very nice deal! If your savvy enough to know how to put it together, then you certainly you can't beat that price.

[KristineS]

That is a nice deal, if you know how to put it together. Wouldn't do me any good as I have zero expertise at that sort of thing.

Congratulations on the deal, Bill. Let us know how it works out.

[orion_joel]

I bought a computer not that long ago, and end up going for a brand name system that was ok spec. I decided to go the brand name over a custom built or Build your own with the parts because that is what i have done the last 2 or 3 times and i was just getting a little tired of having to see if it would all work together or not. It is something that i just really don't want to have to do any more. I spent to many hours working at building computers and stuff previously to even want to consider it any more.

[billbenson]

I've always had clones with no problems. With brand names you frequently need to pay more for their RAM etc. Clones have never given me a problem. I have always bought clones from a clone shop, however. They make sure everything plays together. The only problem I've ever heard of is with video cards not working well with some motherboards.

[orion_joel]

The problem for me is that being in the IT industry for the most part i can price the exact same parts clone shops use at Wholesale, and as such i can see how much they are making. Often this has lead me to buying the bits myself, and putting it together myself.

The PC i bought this time was an Acer, with Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 500GB Hard Drive, and all in a small form factor. The price wholesale was around $880AU but considering the price of the dollar this is probably under $500 US equivalent. The reason i went with this was that it is a low power design, and works very well with hibernation or power saving sleep mode. Which for the most part i have had some issues with clone pc's in this department. I am expecting that the pc itself should save more then half the power i was using before with the clone pc i had which was on 24hours a day because it took so long to load windows.

[billbenson]

does the power draw of your pc matter that much? I live in a part of Florida where it's fairly cool in the winter and hot in the summer. I'm in a leaky old house so 50% of my power bill goes to heating and cooling. I would think that the heating bill for people in the northern states is most of their electricity bill as well. What does leaving a PC on all the time cost? I've never done the math.

I've never even considered sleeping a PC, I just turn off the monitor and go to bed.

I don't like to turn off my pc for a couple of reasons. The main one is that I usually have a ton of windows and programs open. To continue from where I left off if I shut the computer down could take half an hour even with sessions remembered in FF or IE7. There are also a couple of online quote programs I use which actually could loose information.

The other one is downloading emails. Getting 500 spam emails a day at times with attachments, if the computer doesn't download them, they can fill up your server capacity pretty fast. I have my email set at 10M so it's probably not an issue, but could be.

I close everything on Friday evening and turn the PC off. Otherwise it is usually on.

I'm considering changing the way I work. Today, I have one PC that is used for sales activities like quotes etc as well as web design. Some of the web design programs are memory intensive. Because of that, I may have twice the number of windows open at any one time and its easy to get confused, even with tabs after a certain point. I have a monitor/ keyboard / mouse switch. I'm thinking about using one PC for web design and another for sales activities.

The problem is, with my current approach, one pc is dedicated to work the other one is hot standby in case of a computer failure. I live in an extremely high lightning area. Even with a UPS, if both computers are on, a close lightning strike could fry both PC's. I rarely have both pc's on with my current system.

Ya, backup's can avoid data loss, but if I'm down during the week for an hour, it could be that hour that a big order comes in and I miss it. Off hours its lost work time.

There are pro's and cons to all approaches.

Kind of off the subject of the new PC. I was just really surprised how cheap stuff is if you look for a deal and are willing to accept something that is not exactly what you want. In the US, I could probably have found a name brand like HP on sale for under $500 as well. Toss an extra hard drive in there which it should support and I would have the same thing. I've had better luck with clones though.

One other reason I'm doing this is the technology has changed so much. It might not be a lot, but putting together a PC now that the connectors are SATA not IDE etc., kind of makes me familiar with the new interfaces. It's just hooking connector A to connector B, but going through the process every once and a while isn't a bad idea.

Kristine / Evan- I'll let you know what happens, but I've added / replaced hard drives and other piece parts over time. I've never built one from scratch, but its an erector set with 5 pieces. I'll let you know after I do it, but it shouldn't be that bad. Not having done this before, the only thing that makes me nervous is seating the processor as they have a million pins that you can bend. I'm told that the new one's might be different and easier to plug in, but we'll see when I get this.

[Evan]

Doesn't your computer get a bit sluggish after not being rebooted for so long? Or do you not notice a significant change in performance?

[billbenson]

Yes, hence the new pc. What will happen is it will be pretty normal for a day or three depending on what I am doing. When the PC is getting close to dying it will start getting real sluggish and I save and close stuff like crazy and then reboot. Of course that happens when a customer calls and wants a quote right now.

Using something that is memory intensive like Vista the problem should be worse. I am still using win 2k which doesn't take up the resources (RAM and CPU time). Background programs, either spyware or things like norton or messengers take up cpu time and ram and eventually can have an impact. Open tabs in your web browser that have any kind of flash or movies etc running use both ram and cpu resources.

So, yes, ideally I would reboot daily. It just happens to be very inconvenient. But the computer does crash eventually. More ram and a faster machine should help that. I also want to convert to Linux for most stuff and it's a 64 bit machine.


Doesn't your computer get a bit sluggish after not being rebooted for so long? Or do you not notice a significant change in performance?

[orion_joel]

Living in Australia Brisbane, both heating and cooling are not really essential, they would be nice to have but not something that has been considered at home as yet. The majority of our power bill goes to Hot Water probably i would imagine. However we are expecting a power bill soon and it is going to be interesting to see the difference.

One PC was replaced with a laptop over 2 months ago, while i dont know the exact power draw of the pc it had a 250watt power supply, which was probably not being entirely used. The laptop power supply is just 90watt, and also eliminated the monitor. For my computer it was fairly well speced for it's age, and had a 300 watt PSU. the PC i have now i think has a 120watt adapter.

So have cut more then half the potential power usage of both pc's. I am running Vista as it is what came with the system, i do not think i have really taxed it yet, but really notice no lag at all even with a few firefox windows with multiple tabs open. Changing between windows even with all the Vista features enabled is almost seamless. Hibernate pretty much doesnt affect your usage at all from what i have found so far if i put the computer into sleep it keeps the desktop exactly as it was left, just like a laptop when you close the lid. The additional benefit i found was this also powers off the external drive, which was turned on 24/7 previously as well.

While i dont think it is going to be a huge percentage i would expect to see some sort of drop in the power bill. Even if it is just $10 or $20 i think it will be good, because over 2 or 3 years it adds up.

[billbenson]

Let us know what your results are Joel. It will be interesting.

Our local power company says a pc and monitor costs about $20 per month. When I look at my power bill the math doesn't add up when you consider I have a freezer, two refrigerators, a TV thats always on, and a wife who is always washing clothes. Maybe though??

On the frugality note, I'm finding that a chest freezer and buying stuff on sale or from large warehouse stores to fill it saves a lot of money. Our food bill has dropped dramatically since getting it.

[orion_joel]

Frugality is not so much my reasoning behind this purchase. One of the considerations was size, i was sick of having a big chucky computer. This pc the side is not even as big as a sheet of paper, and it is maybe as thick as a decent hardback novel. It is small and it sits on my desk and doesnt look like a eyesaw sitting there. It fits in nicely.

[billbenson]

My desk buts up to a wall full of shelves. I haven't done it yet, but my intention was to put some sliding doors on the wall to hide all the electronics. I arranged things so I have front and rear access to my pc's as something always requires access here and there.

[billbenson]

So, I had 2 pc's. One was purchased in Jul 02 and the other one in Jan 03. I just bought the barebones kit and got it running with a few extra parts and all the data backed up.

I like to keep one hot standby computer in case one fails. I'm effectively out of work without a pc.

so the one I built has been running for about a week and I've transfered all the software. My old backup computer was intermittant. Usually it would turn on, but every once and a while it wouldn't. That changed in recent weeks to it wouldn't turn on for a few days, then it started working for a day.

Yesterday, my old main computer all of a sudden rebooted. I assumed memory just got clogged up after a weeks work without a reboot. Didn't think to much about it and I really didn't loose anything. Last night it just shut down. It was a power supply failure. Left me with my new computer and my intermittent computer. I'm flopping out power supplies from the intermittent computer to the computer with the PS failure.

Very timely building the new computer. It does leave me even more convinced that if your computer is critical to your business, a hot standby computer is critical. I don't mean a backup pc. That could imply you need to load software and backups might not be up to date.

As emails are critical to the sales side of my job, I had my new computer set up to download all emails once a minute but not erase them from the server. I had my old main computer set up to download emails every 30 minutes and erase them from the server. This means that my email is effectively current on both machines no matter what time of the day. Seems to work pretty well.

There are a lot of ways to manage backups etc., depending on your requirements. I got really lucky and had 0 downtime. I'm going to build another computer after the first of the year. That will give me two current computers. One thing I'm going to put in both computers is RAID1 drives. That means two drives that are duplicate images. Computer A fails, plug the drive into computer B and you have all your data.

Just a few thoughts on computer management.