Fwd: Boot failure

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 11:29:13PM -0400, Karl Vogel wrote:
> >> On Sat, 8 Aug 2009 15:38:25 +0200, Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> said:
> 
> R> At $WORK the Dell computers (both desktops and servers AFAIK) that we
> R> use are ditched at the first problem after the warranty runs out which
> R> is after three years, I believe.
> 
>    Interesting.  I've used a Dell GX260 for my workstation since 2003,
>    and I've had no hardware problems running two versions of FreeBSD,
>    one version of OpenBSD and one version of Solaris-10.  Two other 260s
>    have been file-servers since 2004.

The hardware was retired (recently a lot of GX260s) because repairs and
downtime are expensive in man-hours. At $WORK there is a group of volunteers
who check out and rebuild these retired machines, so they can be donated to
schools et cetera. I agree that most of those machines will last several years
longer.

The GX260s we had only came with 128 MB RAM standard, which is a very tight to
run XP with MS office at a reasonable speed. And they came with small
harddisks, because most of our storage is on the network. With added RAM and a
bigger harddisk it is perfectly usable. But I agree they would probably even
perform better with FreeBSD or Linux on it.

For myself I tend not to buy the latest and greatest hardware. It takes time
for support for new hardware to materialize, and the newest fastest hardware
comes with notably reduced value for money.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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