> Sure old Workstation were better built even from the standing point of > today's Intel Workstation, but on the latter you usually get 3 year > warranty and the power supply does not cost the price of a budget PC. > Eventually even the most superb designed workstation will break and when > you hear the price of the replacement parts....
Allow me to tell you this - this "3 years warranty" note is a damn lie, and I'm being polite here. Why? I'll give you an example: Here, on my desk I have an Asus A7V board with Athlon 800Mhz chip. Lets say that the chip will burn as soon as I'll mount it on the board and turn on the machine. IF the shop that I bought from it will have a spare part - then I'll get a replace chip without any charge, but this is the PC business - where a chip shelf life is nothing more then 3-5 months at best - and thats including boards, processors, ram, hard drives - you know... Now - if he doesn't have, then I have to purchase a new processor (and they'll "deduct" the price of an old processor - so my guess they'll deduct $50 - a price of K7-800Mhz) and on top of that - I'll have to buy a new board (why? remember Intel's lie "we need another way to stick a processor, a socket won't help when running at 1+ Ghz" which was actually just trying to shake AMD out?), and if the board vendor decided that SDRAM is not good enough and I have to use RDRAM then I'll have to buy RAM too. What if you had an AGP X2 slot and you got now AGPX8 slot in your new board? ahh, buy a graphics card please... So a warrenty is helpful for few months only for free fixing. After a year or two - you'll need to pay through your nose. > Fortunately you can get adapters "whetever the workstation have" -> VGA > and use a regular screen since a 5+ year old CRT is very hard on the eyes. Hard on your eyes? I don't understand. I'm using A Philips 20B CRT screen (20") bought in 1995 (bought it at my first day of work), and it's working perfectly [knock-on-wood]. > I throw away 4 Workstation this past 2 years, just because the basic price > of the repair was the price of a budget PC with 3 years warranty. > Needles to say, a budget PC performance is supprier to most 5+ year old > workstations. Really depends on your mission. X86 PC still doesn't have the I/O of Ultra Sparc, not mentioning a good old SGI Workstation no matter which OS IMHO. Thanks, Hetz ================================================================To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
