[LINK] Leave on, or turn off?

[Adam Todd]

At 06:40 PM 30/11/2006, Stewart Fist wrote:
>I haven't thought about this much over the last decade, but I now assume
>from some of the postings that most servers these days use specially-built
>high quality components.

Pffft!

>I had assumed that virtually everything made for modern home and business
>PCs, laptops and servers probably comes off the same mass-production
>production-line -- so the basic disks, cpus, memory chips, etc would be
>pretty much the same -- and hence any difference in survivability would be
>due to added fans, power-surge protection, and the like.
>
>Not so ???

Yes so.  A Pentium Chip is a Pentium Chip.  There isn't much difference 
between chips, unless you specifically request Military Spec chipsets and 
they don't cover every possible chip and combination in use.

No one is going to manufacture at high cost zillions of chips to sell in $5 
consumer product.  But at the same time, no one is going to make things 
(other than perhaps Apple iPods) that break all the time!

I've had no problem with good choice components.  You can buy First quality 
gear or you can buy reject cheap stuff from the "well it might be ok" boxes.

Unless you are buying Brand Name gear, and why on earth generally would you 
(laptops excluded) you aren't likely to find chipsets that are any 
different to the next model.

>Incidentally, I once had breakfast with Bill Gates and we argued about the
>relative merits of HDD and wafer-sized non-volatile RAM (which was a popular
>idea at the time).  I was certain that battery-backed wafer-memory
>technology was a real winner, while a rotating magnetic disk could never
>hold more than a gigabyte.  They hadn't even invented Flash in those days.

<smile>