Just bought a PC

[billbenson]

Let us know what your results are Joel. It will be interesting.

Our local power company says a pc and monitor costs about $20 per month. When I look at my power bill the math doesn't add up when you consider I have a freezer, two refrigerators, a TV thats always on, and a wife who is always washing clothes. Maybe though??

On the frugality note, I'm finding that a chest freezer and buying stuff on sale or from large warehouse stores to fill it saves a lot of money. Our food bill has dropped dramatically since getting it.

[orion_joel]

Frugality is not so much my reasoning behind this purchase. One of the considerations was size, i was sick of having a big chucky computer. This pc the side is not even as big as a sheet of paper, and it is maybe as thick as a decent hardback novel. It is small and it sits on my desk and doesnt look like a eyesaw sitting there. It fits in nicely.

[billbenson]

My desk buts up to a wall full of shelves. I haven't done it yet, but my intention was to put some sliding doors on the wall to hide all the electronics. I arranged things so I have front and rear access to my pc's as something always requires access here and there.

[billbenson]

So, I had 2 pc's. One was purchased in Jul 02 and the other one in Jan 03. I just bought the barebones kit and got it running with a few extra parts and all the data backed up.

I like to keep one hot standby computer in case one fails. I'm effectively out of work without a pc.

so the one I built has been running for about a week and I've transfered all the software. My old backup computer was intermittant. Usually it would turn on, but every once and a while it wouldn't. That changed in recent weeks to it wouldn't turn on for a few days, then it started working for a day.

Yesterday, my old main computer all of a sudden rebooted. I assumed memory just got clogged up after a weeks work without a reboot. Didn't think to much about it and I really didn't loose anything. Last night it just shut down. It was a power supply failure. Left me with my new computer and my intermittent computer. I'm flopping out power supplies from the intermittent computer to the computer with the PS failure.

Very timely building the new computer. It does leave me even more convinced that if your computer is critical to your business, a hot standby computer is critical. I don't mean a backup pc. That could imply you need to load software and backups might not be up to date.

As emails are critical to the sales side of my job, I had my new computer set up to download all emails once a minute but not erase them from the server. I had my old main computer set up to download emails every 30 minutes and erase them from the server. This means that my email is effectively current on both machines no matter what time of the day. Seems to work pretty well.

There are a lot of ways to manage backups etc., depending on your requirements. I got really lucky and had 0 downtime. I'm going to build another computer after the first of the year. That will give me two current computers. One thing I'm going to put in both computers is RAID1 drives. That means two drives that are duplicate images. Computer A fails, plug the drive into computer B and you have all your data.

Just a few thoughts on computer management.