Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Getting What You Pay For

As you might expect, I have several computers for which I am responsible. Counting all of them at our company, my personal machine, my wife's computer and our children's machines, I think there are seventeen total.

One that I have is a Pentium computer that I purchased through a reseller from Dash, a local computer distributor here in Kansas City, back in late 2000. It is still running flawlessly. Even so, given it's advanced age, older software and operating system, and relative lack of giddy-up, I've reduced its workload to doing one thing only - it writes and compiles VB6 code for updates to the soon-to-be-replaced  RPMS Version 7.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that machine is the second oldest computer in our domain. The oldest is a 486 that runs an ancient Novell 3.12 network to which we can still connect. We changed over to a Microsoft server back in 2003, but kept the Novell machine running "just in case." I keep thinking that I will take it down and junk it, but now it has become sort of a longevity test. It just sits in the closet with it's monochrome monitor switched off, patiently waiting for the Microsoft server to die. I'm pretty sure that Novell box is from Dash too, and dates back to 1993 or 1994.

I HAD another computer at the office that I used for E-Mail, documents, accounting, and .NET development. But I now have to replace that four-year-old Dell XPS that ran Windows XP. The motherboard went south back in January, and it cost me $75 with my local computer tech to figure that out. That was better than a bad hard drive I guess, but getting a new board is hardly worth the time and trouble, and might necessitate a reformat of my drive anyway. So bottom line, I'm in the market for another computer.

(I've temporarily replaced the XPS with a Dell Vista laptop that our bookkeeper no longer uses. It's fine, but VERY slow to boot and shut down, which Vista seems to want it to do for updates about weekly.)

I'm not a computer reseller, so I can't go to Dash directly, but I would really like to go back to them one way or another for my new Windows 7 computer. Read this article, especially if you're one of our many electronic components reps:

http://www.dashdist.com/1u2u/company/capacitor.html

Who knew?  I used to get computers from resellers that went through Dash all the time, back in the eighties and nineties. But then I stopped. I suppose it was just a dollars and cents thing, because the PC had seemed to become a commodity, with one more or less the same as another. I thought the battle was really about the best software or network.

And now I've re-discovered that the computer really does matter. It's just that it will take you a couple of years to figure that out.

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