>You do I have a point. I have a bunch of really nice PC's here, and they
>all hold their own versus various workstations. But, on the whole, the
>world of the PC definitely caters closer to the LCD than a lot of other
>kinds of hardware.
OK, the Lowest Common Denominator arguement I can buy. I think that in
this day and age there are two different classes of PC's, Consumer Grade,
and Commercial Grade (and both of these are probably split into a high and
low group).
Looking around here, most of the stuff I've got is pretty much commercial
grade stuff (especially stuff like the Quad-Pentium Pro, and Dual Xeon). A
couple exceptions are would be a wierd little i810 board I have sitting in
a wooden rack behind my Sparc 20 (once I got the kinks with Linux worked
out it was rock solid for months, but it's been having network problems
that I think is the switch, and not it). The other exception is a
hopelessly overloaded Dual Processor 400Mhz Celeron. The only thing I use
it for anymore is to dial into work, or to make a disk image of one of the
SCSI disks for my PDP-11. The only time it seems to manage to stay up for
more than 3 days is when I forget it's on. I could blame that on crappy PC
hardware, but in this case I'm more inclined to blame myself (remember I
said it's overloaded).
The OS you have on the hardware can really be the deciding factor in how
stable it is. The 1Ghz Pentium III system I mentioned in my last message
that I have running Linux, and I use to run PDP-10 and PDP-11 emulators is
an HP Vectra (normally I'd never get a prebuilt system, but I got it for
free, and I've got to admit it's rather well built). One of the women I
used to work with has one also, and it's running Windows 98. Hers crashes
all the time, mine running Linux is rock solid.
The other thing to consider is you get what you pay for, if you buy
something like a "Packard Bell" (aren't they finally dead), you're going to
have a piece of crap. The same will undoubtably pretty much hold true with
any of the dirt cheap systems you find at your local computer store.
The trick is to run a good OS, and carefully craft a system to run it using
good parts.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh_at_aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Received on Fri Apr 19 2002 - 12:46:02 BST