| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 65656 | 2006-01-26 03:36:00 | Please ADVISE | olldaddy78 (6546) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 424294 | 2006-01-26 03:36:00 | What computer parts wear out first with only turning off occassionally. MY idea is to make my present COMPUTER last for 4/5 years or more but am I too hopeful? Pro XP with Microsoft SPYWARE and SYMANTEC..... :rolleyes: | olldaddy78 (6546) | ||
| 424295 | 2006-01-26 03:42:00 | I dare say hard drives are most likely to fail or have problems first. | superuser (7693) | ||
| 424296 | 2006-01-26 04:00:00 | PSU, Ram, Motherboard, Harddrive-In that order. I think harddrives get a bit of a bad rap due to a couple of issues. One being that when it happens its a big deal, You are most likely to have lost all your data, and on a brand name comp that usually means your OS and apps as well. Secondly from time to time a manufacturer puts a bad batch on the market, And this gets blown out of proportion due to the nature of the failure....Which goes back to the first point, Its a big deal, People make a lot of noise about it. And you can still see many many people swearing a drive from sch and such a manufacturer is garenteed to die within 6 months, which is of course pure fantasy, The companies making them would be dead by now if true. In my experience the 20 to 80 Gb drives had some issues a coupl,e of years ago, for a period I was seeing dead ones all the time, Now I very rarely do, Due to the fact that current drives aren't giving much issues, and all the ones that were likely to break earlier then expected have already done so. |
Metla (12) | ||
| 424297 | 2006-01-26 04:21:00 | This comp I'm using has a 4.5 Gig HDD, Celeron 335 (approx) CPU and had 32 megs of ram when I got it. It's got win98 on it so I'd say that puts it at about 8 yrs old. ( I doubt someone took a later OS off it and intalled 98, but possible) So it's ancient. Well, old. I use it at least once a day and turn it off at the wall when not in use. Sometimes I boot up three-four times a day if there's a thread I'm following at Pressf1. The ones I use at work (2) get turned off and on every day and are five years old. (We are planning to replace them though.) They run smooth as. Unless you've got a duff compenent or components in my experience I wouldn't worry about it. I think expecting 4-5 years is quite reasonable.[Edit : with sensible usage. (but that's another thread.)] |
mark c (247) | ||
| 424298 | 2006-01-26 04:48:00 | I have one system still going fine after 9 years, powered down fully every day. I permanently "lent" it a couple of years ago, but have just been told its working fine and used regularly for email (Win 95). Another system here powered up daily for an hour or two is 5 years old, it's had 2 new HDD's, much as Metla has outlined I suspect. But no drama as backups were in place. Another system has been going for 3 years, with one HDD failure (as above) and one PSU (replaced as a precautionary measure only as it was undersized) Yet another system is going fine after 5 years, it gets powered up about 4 times a week. Oddly enough the most reliable systems have been "brand name" ones, the worst have been locally built units. I have always favoured powering down when not using, the arguments for hardware reliability being better when left running ceased about 1985 in my view. |
godfather (25) | ||
| 424299 | 2006-01-26 04:52:00 | I know I installed the Linux OS on one of my computers in 1996. The computer wasn't new then. It's a 386SX20, so it was probably made about 1990. Its original 40MB disk is still going. | Graham L (2) | ||
| 424300 | 2006-01-26 04:56:00 | the most comman resons i see for componant failure is either poor quailty parts (cheap crap) or poor cooling design (cheap builder). i see quite a few that have both. even if its got a big name parts to it it only takes a cheap PSU to toast the lot. its also really comman to have a cooling system that has not had any design work put into it. this is really important with todays pc's, much more critical than older pc's. | tweak'e (69) | ||
| 424301 | 2006-01-26 06:13:00 | Over about 14 years of computing, I've only had 2 hardware failures. One was hard drive failure. I had it partitioned so that there was roughly 600MB per "drive" in Windows (4 partitions). However, one by one, the partitions died, till there was only C: left, then about a week later, that went too. The other failure was via a motherboard disk controller dying. I couldn't be bothered replacing it, as it was rather old anyway, so I got a new computer instead. And that's after using 9 different computers in 14 years... |
Haze (3028) | ||
| 424302 | 2006-01-26 17:42:00 | I leave my Enermax/Soyo powered up all the time (no caps or limits on DSL here) and occasionally CTRL/ALT, U, R for a soft boot to set new pointers and allow registry changes etc to take effect . Other than that, all 8 HDDS run 24/7, five years now . :blush: I had to shut down to change out a bad vid card last month though . . . only for 1/2 hour or so . I run a clock as a screensaver and it's used as a night light and timekeeper too . I don't think this monitor has been off ever . . well not OFF, but in that limbo stage when the service light alternates from green to yellow . I think the power switch is defective and it took me a full day to get it to hold last time, so I don't ever power it down . . . . . . . besides, I like the little lights winking and blinking all the time . . . . lol |
SurferJoe46 (51) | ||
| 424303 | 2006-01-26 19:24:00 | Last year I had my external backup hard drive--a Maxtor 160gb-- fail after 13 months, just out of warranty.Only turned on to do backups. So that meant a lot of searching on cd's for bits and pieces. Still haven't found all those gifs I carefully saved!! |
Neil McC (178) | ||
| 1 2 | |||||