On Friday 22 September 2006 16:25, Ian Cheong wrote: > A major item we are dependent on is our network switch. It's not > likely to fail but if it does, the whole place goes down. Can we > justify having a spare for several hundred dollars even though we > don't really need it?
Can you justify *not* having it? For items that are highly unlikely to fail, I often buy inferior replacements cheaply. They just sit on the shelf in case they are needed (eg 16 port switch for $40), and would do the trick for a few days until the genuine replacement arrives. A compromise, but worked for me so far. With items with reasonably predictable failure rate (eg hard disks) I don't wait until they fail. I just swap them e.g. yearly and sell the old ones - since I buy hardware at wholesale prices and in one year the price drop is rarely extreme, it doesn't really cost much to do it (the actual work of swapping hardware and sourcing well priced hardware is outsourced to my son, haven't got the time to do it myself) Things I found doctors tend to "save" on and invariably regret it one day: 1.) UPS 2.) UPS 3.) UPS 4.) replacement power supplies 5.) hard disk trays with spare hard disks 6.) network switches and cables 7.) monitor cables 8.) backup media 9.) connectivity Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
