[OT] Custom computers

[Walt Brown]

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-bounces at lists.runrev.com
[mailto:use-livecode-bounces at 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

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