DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[retard]

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:04:59 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> My failure list from most to least would be this:
> 
> 1. power supply / printer
> 2. optical drive / floppies (the disks, not the drives)
> 3. hard drive
> 4. monitor / mouse / fan

My list is pretty much the same. I bought a (Toshiba IIRC) dot matrix 
printer (the price was insane) in 1980s. It STILL works fine when printing 
ASCII text, but it's "a bit" noisy and slow. Another thing is, after 
upgrading from DOS, haven't found any drivers for printing graphics. On 
DOS, only some programs had specially crafted drivers for this printer 
and some had drivers for some other proprietary protocol the printer 
"emulates" :-)

My second printer was some Canon LBP in the early 90s. STILL works 
without any problems (still connected to my Ubuntu CUPS server), but it's 
also relatively slow and physically huge. I used to replace the toner and 
drums, toner every ~2 years (prints 1500-3000 pages of 5% text) and drum 
every 5-6 years. We bought it as used from a company. It had been 
repaired once by the official Canon service. After that, almost 20 years 
without repair.

I also bought a faster (USB!) laser printer from Brother couple of years 
ago. I've replaced the drum once and replaced the toner three times with 
some cheapo 3rd party stuff. It was a bit risky to buy a set of 10 toner 
kits along with the printers (even the laser printers are so cheap now), 
but it was an especially cheap offer and we thought the spare part prices 
go up anyway. The amortized printing costs are probably less than 3 cents 
per page.

Now, I've also bought Canon, HP, and Epson inkjets. What can I say.. The 
printers are cheap. The ink is expensive. They're slow, and result looks 
like shit (not very photo-realistic) compared to the online printing 
services. AND I've "broken" about 8 of them in 15 years. It's way too 
expensive to start buying spare parts (e.g. when the dry ink gets stuck 
in the ink "tray" in Canon printers). Nowadays I print photos using some 
online service. The inkjet printer quality still sucks IMO. Don't buy 
them.

PSUs: Never ever buy the cheap models. There's a list of bad 
manufacturers in the net. They make awful shit. The biggest problem is, 
if the PSU breaks, it might also break other parts which makes all PSU 
failures really expensive. I've bought <ad>Seasonic, Fortron, and 
Corsair</ad> PSUs since the late 1990s. They work perfectly. If some part 
fails, it's the PSU fan (or sometimes the fuse when switching the PSU on 
causes a surge). Fuses are cheap. Fans last much longer if you replace 
the engine oil every 2-4 years. Scrap off the sticker in the center of the 
fan and pour in appropriate oil. I'm not kidding! I've got one 300W PSU 
from 1998 and it still works and the fan is almost as quiet as if it was 
new.

Optical drives: Number 1 reason for breakage, I forget to close the tray 
and kick it off! Currently I don't use internal optical drives anymore. 
There's one external dvd burner. I rarely use it. And it's safe from my 
feet on the table :D

Hard drives: these always fail, sooner or later. There's nothing you can 
do except RAID and backups (labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf). 
I've successfully terminated all (except those in use) hard drives so far 
by using them normally.

Monitors: The CRTs used to break every 3-5 years. Even the high quality 
Sony monitors :-| I've used TFT panels since 2003. The inverter of the 
first 14" TFT broke after 5 years of use. Three others are still working, 
after 1-6 years of use.

Mice: I've always bought Logitech mice. NEVER had any failures. The 
current one is MX 510 (USB). Previous ones used the COM port. The bottom 
of the MX510 shows signs of hardcore use, but the internal parts haven't 
fallen off yet and the LED "eye" works :-D

Fans: If you want reliability, buy fans with ball bearings. They make 
more noise than sleeve bearings. I don't believe in expensive high 
quality fans. Sure, there are differences in the airflow and noise 
levels, but the max reliability won't be any better. The normal PC stores 
don't sell any fans with industrial quality bearings. Like I said before, 
remember to replace the oil http://www.dansdata.com/fanmaint.htm -- I 
still have high quality fans from the 1980s in 24/7 use. The only problem 
is, I couldn't anticipate how much the power consumption grows. The old 
ones are 40-80 mm fans. Now (at least gaming) computers have 120mm or 
140mm or even bigger fans.