Hi Richard. I buy name brand boxes for non-technical use, like research, email, presentations, etc, as I want them to be as vendor-standard as possible to reduce the chance I may have to do a hardware diagnosis in a middle of the row coach seat or standing on stage before a presentation. I also use out of the box major brand computers for testing and validation, and for all the non-technically-astute family members and neighbors I am the tech-support-of-first-and-last-resort for. If I "borrow" one of those for an experiment, I usually take out the HD so it stays "clean" and use a left over lab drive.
It was also my work for a couple decades, I co-managed a WW developer support and professional services org. Standard practice was always start from scratch with a known good integration and fresh OS install for each issue that came in the door. You can very easily fall into a black hole of debugging integration and kernel tuning issues that have no direct benefit for the time and effort. For various oddball experiments, servers, etc, I just cobble up what I need from what's lying around. A surprising amount of functional parts have accumulated in my compost pile, er, home office, after a few decades. I have a few industrial rack chassis, but they sound like jets taking off in the basement. I haven't used them in a while, as the cost of commodity PC bits drops pretty rapidly from introduction now and passive backplane CPUs are still in the multi-K range. A very interesting lab setup I saw once and am thinking of emulating was a piece of plywood on the wall with all the PC and cooling bits velcroed to the plywood for easy reconfiguration. But take my opinion with a grain of salt, I still don't think gasoline will beat out steam as a motive force. Update - I searched on "plywood" and "PC" just now and saw lots of interesting rigs. Anyway, if you have the bits, or have a friend with a big e-compost pile, and the time and patience, its not hard or expensive, especially if you aren't going to trigger any domestic friction by installing what looks like a demented robot that's been run over by a truck in the dining room (I did that once, I'll never do that again) and don't need some kind of flashy whiz bang case. Also look on Ebay, a friend of mine just picked up a bunch of Dell dual 3GHz Xeon, dual PS, Raid, 2GB, ATI RageXL 2U boxes for $35 per each (refurbs no less!) as starting points. Walt -----Original Message----- From: use-livecode-boun...@lists.runrev.com [mailto:use-livecode-boun...@lists.runrev.com] On Behalf Of Richard Gaskin Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 11:44 AM To: How to use LiveCode Subject: [OT] Custom computers I was looking for a beefy quad core system and my brother convinced me that the cost savings and customizability makes it well worth the time to assemble the parts. So I'm curious: How many of you here have built your own computers? Did you go with a barebones, or do it from scratch? Did you go with Intel or AMD, and why? I'm leaning toward AMD myself given what appears to be an excellent price/performance value, and will likely build from scratch because I'm picky about the case. Seems a surprising number of people I know build their own systems, kinda makes me wonder why I ever bought an off-the-shelf PC. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
