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Quoting Clare Shepherd <clareeshepherd@xxxxxxx>: > > On 7 Nov 2007, at 18:20, Simon Waters wrote: > >> Experience here similar, I use to do a lot of Unix admin work for >> desktop Unix. Solaris and HP-UX mainly. Towards the end the IBM PCs >> were >> reaching the point where they could compete in terms of computing >> power >> and graphics capabilities, and the pricing of the Unix kit meant that >> they priced themselves out of that market. Replacement was more often >> Windows rather than Linux in my experience, not least a lot of folks >> were doing work that required decent graphics cards, and at the time >> Linux graphics driver support wasn't that great. >> >> Prior to that a lot of the high end CAD packages use to be written to >> support a small range of graphics cards (because things like OpenGL >> didn't exist, or weren't up to the job), so you had to buy a SUN, >> or an >> HP, or SGI workstation, and it had to have specific cards to work >> effectively. >> >> That said the quality on some of the Unix workstation kit was >> extremely >> good, and there are still people using them, but it is pretty small >> numbers. >> >> Whilst Clare says she'd pay for quality, when push came to shove, >> almost >> all businesses couldn't justify the quality being offered. Also there >> was a lot of convergence in hardware, towards the end apart from a few >> novel processors (PA-Risc and Ultra-Sparc) the components were >> often off >> the shelf PC components, as they represented best value for money. >> >> Arguably Apple won the make bespoke Unix desktop hardware battle, by >> switching to Unix when everyone else seemed to have all but given >> up the >> fight. >> > I realise I'm in the minority but I like the idea of stuff that just > goes on working, but I want it both ways, I want it upgradeable. > Perhaps you just have to settle for buy, use for 3 or 4 years and > upgrade. However, I know of a guy who runs a HP-UX machine that's 9 > years old and has never been rebooted. > Clare > I think I get what you mean, apart from a motherboard failure on my PC, it seems to be okay now running 24x7. I suppose it depends on the components and build quality. For example, I have a Dell Optiplex GX110 running at work as a fax server/apache server/general Linux box. It just works. It's about 7 years old and it keeps going, where as my Dell Optiplex GX620 desktop is awful. It crashes every so often and sometimes won't reboot. It's less than a year old! Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html