atw: Re: Maintaining your own PC (Was: meltdowns...)

Stuart Burnfield: On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:14:01 +0900,  you wrote:
> I'm with Damian on this. It should be possible for most of us TWs to
> maintain a PC for a few years with only basic maintenance and upgrades. Of
> course some of us will have special requirements and there will be the odd
> horror story such as Steve's ....

A few years, yes.   With qualifications.   I had one period a few years ago
when a new popular-brand laptop collapsed completely -- requiring a new mother
board and consequently a new hard disk.   9 months later the guarantee
replacement did a similar trick.... leading to some interesting arguments
about whether it was still within the (original) guarantee period !      Days
or even weeks of delays are not handy but probably inevitable in situations
like this.

Yes you can, as Damian says "acquire a decent operational PC"  for a while,
but guaranteeing how long it will last is another question..    We are still
dealing in many cases with technology that has not be tested for a life-time
of years.  No-one knows its shelf-life or its working life except in the
context of  intensive or destructive testing that may or may not be valid as
an indication of Real World use.

And there are still too many things that can go wrong for anyone to get cocky
about their PC setup.      Complex equipment works in complex ways and has a
lot of obsolescence built in -- albeit not (completely) deliberately. 

Who would have dreamt a few years ago of a computer batteries bursting into
flames under keyboards across the world ?

The rule is:  don't let the gods hear your hubris.

> but MS Office, FrameMaker, Author IT, Acrobat,
> Corel Draw, Paint Shop Pro and Firefox are not demanding applications.
>

With the exception of Firefox, I find all of them capable of being demanding
when it comes to having to cough up $$$s for a license or upgrade.


> "Hardware always needs upgrading"--I used my previous non-bleeding-edge Dell
> PC for five years, but I'd have felt I had my money's worth out of it even
> if it had conked out after four years. The only forced hardware upgrade was
> some extra memory when I eventually changed to XP from Windows 98.
>
> Storage capacity--how does anyone manage to run out of disk space on a work
> PC these days?
>

Easy.  Pause and reflect: why do you think we keep on getting larger and
larger disks being made available if people aren't regularly doing exactly
that ?

I seem to do it regularly.   It helps if you have requirements for dual boot
or VM access to two separate operating systems, maintaining version control a
few thousand pages of documentation in a number of sets, including a thousand
or so images. It helps if you have to convert to new document formats in a
change process like FrameMaker to Structured FrameMaker to DITA...    It helps
if you also have to have a bloated Msoft Office system to read input from
those who use that.  It helps if you do daily backups to separate disks.  It
helps if you are starting to maintain a basic doc set for translation into
several languages. It helps if CDs and DVDs don't have anything like the
capacity of your hard drive. It helps if you don't have enough time to do all
the book-keeping and file compression etc on existing backups because you're
on tight deadlines.

I wouldn't have even contemplated Gigabytes of RAM or even disk space when I
started in tech writing unless I was going to run or store data on a
mainframe.

Today I've got storage edging up to a terabyte, and I'm looking to throw away
existing RAM so I can upgrade to 2 Gigs.  Give us a few years, and it's 
exabyte disks.  Moore's Law and Murphy's Law coalesce.

All it needs for disaster like Steve's to be just around the corner, is that
combination we all have from time to time:   a touch of Laziness and a touch of
Hubris   (acknowledgements to Larry Wall). 

Meanwhile, the only safeguard against all the other things I mentioned in 
passing, which actually seemed to loom pretty large in Steve's woes, is to
choose who you work for.    But that's a bit like being careful who you
have as parents. 

I think I got lucky in that a few years ago:  although luck wasn't the only
factor: some judgement was called for.

But it's not easy to choose who you have to work for, or to know how reliable
or reasonable or honest they will be.    And there are a lot of idiot managers
out there, run by people who get rich because they take more away from others
than they ever give back..

--Peter M



 





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