DreamPC 2006 ready for it's grave...

Hello,

My experiment with building a DreamPC has pretty much come to an end.

I am now fed up with it's problems.

The top 5 problems/killers a

1. Dust
2. Overheat
3. Electric shocks
4. Physical shocks
5. Insects

For some reason the brand new hitachi 2 TB drive has failed according
to Microsoft Windows 7, it is supposed to have bad sectors.

Which is kinda strange...

Perhaps the motherboard is malfunctioning again and is cause of
problems. Perhaps it's windows 7 corruption but it also seems hardware
wise problem.

Knoppix live does work somewhat with the drives, Google Chrome is
weird and cannot post. Conquerer webbrowser can post, it warns about
invalid security certificates which is kinda weird.

The antec 1200 is bad case, the scythe zipang cooler was way too big,
the gtx 7900 overheated, the amd x2 cpu ran way too hot, some of these
components were on cutting edge, and some just bad.

Conclusion is:

Building PC is not as easy as one would think, there are dangers some
up above in short, many things can cause those dangers.

Conclusion:

Do not do bussiness with individual component sellers, they don't care
if a system dies, it's not their problem, it will be your problem.

It's probably better to buy whole systems from HP, Dell or any other
big system seller, if they **** up it is there responsibility and it's
going to cost them big time in warranties and perhaps lawsuits, not so
with individual components. Individual components might look nice but
can have many hidden defects or consequences.

I am still somewhat skeptical if HP/Dell or any system seller's system
is actually better.

I also believe the term: DESKTOP is retarded, putting a desk on a
table is just plain stupid. The chance of hitting the table while
standing up, sitting down or hitting the mouse is much higher than
kicking a pc case on the ground. PC's should probably be placed on
ground and never on a table.

It's difficult to say what the exact cause of death is in all
situations... perhaps electrical system in my house plays a roll as
well, I shall try and see if I can solve those problems, like a fridge
always running and no earth grounding...

Having a PC constantly die on my is no fun... I also did lot's of
gaming maybe that plays a roll..

Here are some further thoughts on possible causes:

1. Perhaps hot/cold plays a big roll.
2. I wonder what happens to harddisk if a lot of cold air is blown
over them, could that actually be a bad problem ? Maybe the harddisks
died because of a mix of hot and cold air ?!? Maybe the antec 1200
caused bad sectors on the harddisks to occur because of excessive cold
air being blown in... a worthy hypothesis to investigate... perhaps
some strange happens to the platters inside a harddisk if it becomes
to cold or mixed cold.
3. Fans attached to harddisk bays is probably a bad design decision
which I already posted about in the past.

Anyway for now my trust in computer technology has sunk to a
deeeeeeeeeeeep low point.

I will most definetly not buy phones or tables because they seems to
break quite easily as reported by other people, so that option as a
reliable replacement for a PC is out of the window

I am also quite fed up with Windows... it's pretty dumbed down and out
of control... I have little control over what it is doing... I am
seriously thinking about switching to something else... perhaps
Knoppix or Ubuntu...

However some of my files are in windows format like windows live mail
or whatever... I am not sure if that can be exported to ubuntu as well
as virtual harddisks..


For now my "recovery" strategy will be as follows:

I shall try and buy a cheap Dell/HP/Sony... or whatever system I can
find at a local store or so and see if that can fit my needs, I kinda
doubt it but it seems I have little choice... so for now my strategy
will be: "Treat PC's like disposable components" but do make sure to
backup data often to other systems as well, and try to sort out
electrical system in house, maybe I even have to move to be sure it's
ok, but moving would kinda suck.

For what it's worth I will also post my last rant when my system died
but it didn't get posted because of chromo but now conquerer can:

Well I am not yet sure if I am gonna post that rant... it's probably
on my data drive which I disconnected as an experiment to see if that
would help.

This is like the 4th or 5th that that I cannot access my data, it's
fokking strange... so many fails lately ! WOW LOL.

I guess it's time to get some new systems or something... even Knoppix
also failed a little bit it has a little bit of difficulties with
spaces but can stil open files with gedit/whatever....

Maybe it's better if I don't post that rant but it had some
interesting thoughts in it I guess... so I would like to read it
myself at least one more time to see how I see the future during bad
times...


I can tell you one thing right now though:

Computers have become very important, people would like to store a lot
of information on it and would like to depend on it, but the hardware
is failing in multiple ways nowadays... because of different reasons,
overheat, complexity, bugs, etc.

I hope this trend changes... I fear the worst though.

I see people wanting to pay with their mobile phones ?!? Why turn such
a simple robust technique with real money into a super complex
technology handling ? It's madness/close-to-retardeness, you drop your
phone on the floor like you would money, and suddenly you can't even
pay your groceries because you dropped your phone in the supermarket.

I hope people start thinking more about "simplicity/robustness vs
computer technology"... nowadays people apply way too much technology
to things which were much simpler without it. People are making our
society very vunerable to technological failures and it sux badly and
it's gonna suck even worse in the future.

Though I do like the new supermarket system of scanning products,
stuffing them in bags and paying with pinpas and walking out store
without having to repacking them... but when the device fails or
whatever there is also a bit of a panick ! LOL... and the pinpas
system has also failed nationality or on large scale a couple of
times... fortuntely not when I was shopping - The horror ! =D This
is why I care money with me when I go shopping for one electronical
systems fail, so I can still pay

Bye,
Skybuck.