Text 15241, 67 rader
Skriven 2006-02-07 18:26:00 av Paul Rogers (1:105/360.0)
     Kommentar till en text av Charles Angelich
Ärende: Antivirus for Win98
===========================
 CA> I'm a bit fuzzy on "backup up the hardware". Can you expand on
 CA> that a little bit so that I know what you refer to here?

OK, let's look at likely failure modes.  Absent a major power
glitch, the purely electronic stuff has long past the "infant
mortality" phase.  The probability of it's failure is small.
The most likely failures are going to be bearings wearing out
in the mechanical devices.  Fans fail fairly regularly, but not
catastrophically.  Generally they'll get noisy long before they
fail.  She'll have time for me to get there.

The most significant point of failure, and the one that affected
her two previous desktop boxes, is a HD failure.  So I built
this box to make that as easily recoverable as possible.  The
drives aren't screwed-in inside the case.  I put adapters in the
5 1/4" slots with removable trays for the drives.  The drive can
be removed without disassembling the box.  There are two of
them, and the drives are interchangable identical models.

If the C: drive fails she can easily pull it out.  The most
difficult thing to do is switch the jumper on the backup drive.
Some wouldn't need that, but these do.  OTOH, these WD Caviar's
have proven to be very reliable.  It's now a solo but needs to
become a "master", because the CDROM is the primary slave.  I
made sure she knew how to slide off the lid, tip out the drive
without even unplugging the cables, snag the jumper with a
finger nail and switch it.  One of the drives even has pictures
showing how it goes, and I gave her written instructions.

She can recover from a HD failure in 10 minutes.  No service
call necessary.  Having been bitten twice by HD failures, she
tends to use floppies a lot for work-in-progress.  What she
NEEDS is a working computer.  That's what I've taken steps to
provide--backing up the hardware in ways that it makes sense
to do.  (A second fan for the PS, for example, doesn't make
sense.)

 PR> everything that makes sense to keep a running system.

 CA> "Makes sense" is a comparative term comparable to beauty being

Of course.  Reliability is like speed--see tagline.

 CA> accomplishments while users struggle to replace commercial (pay
 CA> as you go) anti-virus software with software that offers free
 CA> updates and removing even ZoneAlarm to install an updated
 CA> version of ZoneAlarm borders on trashing your system's OS.

 CA> Windows + Internet = a disaster waiting to happen, and I see no
 CA> end of it in sight any time soon.

I agree completely.  I wish I could persuade my clients to
switch to Linux, but no chance.  Linux isn't ultimately secure
either--the Morris Worm attacked Unix systems.  But it's MORE
secure under the present circumstances.  Absolute security isn't
possible in the real world, but it is possible to do better than
Windows.

Paul Rogers, paulgrogers@yahoo.com                       -o)
http://www.angelfire.com/or/paulrogers                   /\\
Rogers' Second Law: Everything you do communicates.     _\_V

... Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?
___ MultiMail/MS-DOS v0.35

---
 * Origin: The Bare Bones BBS (1:105/360)