It has been a bad computer week for me. I operate a small wired network with 5 computers and a laptop connected by WiFi. One of my systems (a cheap HP refurbished tower I bought about three years ago) failed last week. I heard a loud pop and, after that, the thing would only run for about 5 minutes before going into thermal shutdown. I could reboot and get another 5 minutes but that was it. I stripped the memory, hard drive and DVD drive and put the balance out for the garbage man. So I went on the Walmart site and bought another HP refurbished tower. What came was not a tower but one of those small skinny desktops. I was upset but I figured it wasn't worth getting worked up about it and connected it to my network. You guessed it, thermal shutdown after 5 minutes. There had to be something wrong so I brought one of the other computers (one of my home brew builds) to this desk and hooked it up. Worked just fine. The two HP's were actually defective. Nothing wrong with the connections. I packed up the skinny desktop and sent it back to the seller. My wife suggested that, perhaps, I should buy a new computer instead of buying the refurbed. She even said she would buy it for me for Christmas so I agreed. Being a long time HP customer I called HP and talked to a rep about their Envy Tower. I asked a couple of questions. The rep asked me for my company name. I said that wasn't important at the moment, I had a couple more questions and then I would give him all the information he needed to sell me the computer. Click. He was gone. He hung up on me. Surprised I also hung up and stared at the wall for a few seconds. The computer I am using is an Acer laptop. I like it because it has a stronger power supply connector than other brands and it lasts longer for that reason. I shrugged my shoulders and called Acer. To make a long story short, the rep didn't know the answers to my questions but I forgave him because he was still on the phone. He didn't hang up. I ordered a nice little tower with a 6 core I5 and an SSD. Same price as the HP which had a hard drive. My fingers are crossed. It should arrive next week and should work out just fine. The image of the back of the computer showed a wired ethernet port and an HDMI video output. I'm rooting for Acer because I'm tired of the time I've spent replacing a broken system. Sorry for the rant.
I had an acer completely fail on me one time without notice. It is the only time that has ever happened with a computer. Had to get a geek to remove the Hard drive to retrieve the info off it. After that, he said it worked a few times when he was testing it to resell as a used part (the HD) and failed too. IDK. I recently bought a new Dell. Haven't set it up yet, but have never had a problem with their computers. I stopped buying from them for awhile because their black friday sales are a ripoff. They are sold out of all they allegedly have on sale in like 15 seconds.
I can tell you that as cheap laptops go, Acer is the best I have ever owned. I have owned HP, Lenovo and ASUS. None of those lasted more than two years because the power supply connectors failed. The Acer has a stronger connector and it chugs on. I'll let you know how the new tower works out. I'm not worried about it.
I gave up on laptops but a Lenovo was the best one I ever had. They aren't that great to keyboard on IMO.
On the opposite, mine was great. I upgraded to a 1.5Gigabit connexion with no cap and replaced my aging 1tb drives in my media servers to 4tb ones, giving me a 28tb capacity + one 4tb drive for parity with Snapraid. I also got a RTX2070Super on discount from a friend who upgraded to an RTX3090.
I still have one that I don't use. I can get it to work by connecting the power supply and twisting and turning the connector until something happens. I can get to work on battery but recharging is nearly impossible. Bad computer for me. I don't have time to fuss with it. My Acer replaced it.
Hell I broke the hinges on my screen and my lenovo would still work. I just had to prop it up against something. It may depend on which one you had, when it was made, etc. They were still a rather unknown when I got mine maybe 8 years ago. I eventually replaced it with I forget what that I gave away without ever really using much because it was just uncomfortable to use.
I have 2 Lenovo at home. One is a 4th gen dual core i7 that I used as my HTPC until it got replaced with an Nvidia shield this summer, and the other is my on the road movie/cd ripping and python coding machine with a 2nd gen Ryzen 5 and Vega 8. That one was also only $350US and is a bit cheap on the construction and finish buut it still sport a 1920x1080 native res screen while other in that bracket only sport 1366x768 res.
The little tower arrived from Acer yesterday and I have nearly finished setting it up for use. This is my first experience with an SSD and I'm impressed. It is quick and dead silent. If it proves to be reliable I will stop buying hard drives. I haven't loaded the LAN driver yet so I'm using it with its built in wireless. So far so good. It seems like a decent product.
Yes. It would be crazy to buy a computer now a days without an SSD. Last computer we sold with only a hard drive was almost two years ago. And even that one the client had us clone it to an SSD recently.
The negative aspect of SSD's is limited life span. A hard drive will last at least twice as long without failure. I do like the way the SSD performs, though.
That was true for the earlier SSDs. Especially after NAND, it's not the case. But it's difficult to compare because the life span of SSDs and HDDs is calculated differently. HDDs are calculated by the number of reads and writes. The older SSDs were measured that way, and they are at a disadvantage. Because they were written, not in binary, like HDDs, but in quaternary (base 4). And overwriting sectors reduced the life of the disk significantly. But with NAND (and other technologies), SSDs don't need anywhere as many reads and writes as HDDs do. It is wise to turn off DEFRAG. SSDs don't need it, and it reduces their life span. But, in normal use, it's estimated that a good quality SSD (Samsung, Crucial, WD...) could last on average over 300 years. Because it's just a flash memory with no moving parts. And it's based on the expected lifetime of the cells. That doesn't mean all SSDs will last 300 years, of course. It's just a mathematical estimation based on typical use of SSDs in normal environments. But, in general, in normal use SSD should last longer then HDDs when you take into consideration the likelihood of failure of the moving parts. All this is based on theoretical models that require many assumptions. It very much depends on how the measuring is done. But, bottom line, durability of SSDs is not an issue anymore.
not anymore, seems the ssd's may outlast normal hard drives, especially on laptops where moving a spinning hard drive could damage it, I will never go back to the older hard drives
The 8 year old motherboard eventually gave up the ghost on my primary tower so I opted for a cheaper alternative that could still handle the 32k RAM that I prefer. Since the new MB had an AMD Ryzen CPU as opposed to the Intel I7 I had been using I was not too concerned since it was highly rated by all of the reviews. What I subsequently discovered was that AMD Ryzen does NOT play nicely with MS HyperV. I was having the machine freeze up and it required a BIOS reset to disable HyperV in order to reboot. After a few experiments I realized that if I simply disabled the sleep mode the problem no longer occurs. Since I had opted to replace the hard drive with a 1 TB SSD the need for sleep mode has become irrelevant. Overall while it might be a cheaper setup and getting around the HyperV glitch was annoying the new setup is now running smoothly and just as responsive as the original if not even more so.
Often there are more than one way to skin the cat. I'm struggling with a 5 year old main board that shows a cpu fan error and then stops POST. The cpu fan, of course, works perfectly. I disabled the routine that checks the fan in BiOS but that didn't stop the error. It just allowed me to get around the error and finally complete POST and load Windows. I'm going to flash the BIOS today with an update. If that doesn't work I'll just turn the computer into a backup. I don't want to have to train someone on how to get the OS loaded with every Microsoft update.
My own experience is that hardware does have a limited lifespan but if you want it to last as long as possible then max out the RAM that the MB can handle. Now that we have SSD's which are just another form of RAM as opposed to magnetic storage media the latency lag to read the HD has virtually disappeared thereby improving performance even with a less expensive CPU. Perhaps the most durable component of modern hardware is the case itself. A tower case can accommodate just about everything you need and replacing power supplies and fans is routine. The issue you are having the CPU fan is not something that can be diagnosed remotely but on one of my other tower machines the CPU fan has been kicking in and making a racket so I am installing a fan hub controller and two additional fans which I will probably install next week.
I have a lot of computer experience even to the point of manufacturing them for several years so I tend not to keep up with technology. With the exception of the new tower, my computers are fairly old, ranging from 5 years to 20 years in age. I'm not a gamer and business computing and internet don't require much computing power. I spent a while reading about SSD's which I have never owned prior to the new tower. Apparently the technology is anything but mature. There are vertical NAND units that stack the chips for better performance and even PCIE units that don't use a SATA interface. Obviously this technolology will eventually put hard drives out of business as soon as they get down to hard drive prices. I noticed that Western Digital is now providing SSD's. Obviously they see that as well. This thread was a learning experience to me. Even old dogs can learn something from others. Thanks.
That's interesting. I have never changed a motherboard with a different brand of processor when keeping the same Hard Drive (or SSD). I'm just not that adventurous. Especially not with one of my client's computer. I would have thought a lot of horrendous things could happen. Especially with Hyper-V. Even though Intel's virtualization (Intel-VT) and the one on the Ryzen (AMD-V) do the same thing, they work very differently. But I would imagine that if the change doesn't make the hard drive useless (or, at least, the contents), which is what I feared might happen (so I never tried it), if you disable Hyper-V, reboot and then reenable Hyper-V and reboot again, it should change from Intel-VT to AMD-V. I still don't think I'd try it on one of my client's computer, but it would be interesting to know.
The only aspect of the HD impacted by a different MB and processor would be the drivers. They are relatively easy to update. Since the HD was already 8 years old it made sense to replace it with a new one for the sake of reliability. It now serves as the D-Drive and has everything that was on the system prior to the replacement. I suspect that the HyperV sleep mode freezing is that the host goes to sleep before the client although why the MS HyperV code cannot detect this on AMD processors is a mystery that I cannot find a solution for on the interwebs. Others have had the same problem and none of their "solutions" worked except shutting down sleep mode on the host. FTR the HyperV client was reinstalled using the AMD processor as one of the attempted solutions that failed.
You guys now have me hooked on SSD's. Last night I moved my accounting computer hard drive to a 1 TB SSD. Amazing difference. Next will be my laptop.
I gave my nephew a new video card and RAM. He put them into an ancient build and when he turned it on there was a loud pop. He took a chance, spent about $50 on a new power supply and it's all better now. Phew.
