A 32 GB Solid State HD installed in a Dell 630?

[joe tedesco]

What can I expect with a 32 GB Solid State HD installed in a Dell 630?

How does it work and can I expect better service along with the Windows XP instead of Vista?

What equipment do you use to present your seminars?

 

[mdshunk]

Getting rid of your hard drive that used vacuum tubes?

How about one of these. They seem pretty reliable:

 

[joe tedesco]

Getting rid of your hard drive that used vacuum tubes?

How about one of these. They seem pretty reliable:

I threw mine away in 1992! Have been using computers since then. I thought the new Solid State drive would be something new for me to try out. I have a closet full of gadgets and materials I used for training. Hard to believe that I can carry all of the filles, and videos I need on a thumb drive that I can now plug into my projector. Who's coming to Arlington, VA or Glen Burnie, MD?

 

[Rampage_Rick]

What can I expect with a 32 GB Solid State HD installed in a Dell 630?

How does it work and can I expect better service along with the Windows XP instead of Vista?

What equipment do you use to present your seminars?

It will work terribly poorly... Mail the solid state drive to me instead... :grin:

Honestly though, I would love to have an SSD. I'm going to assume that it's made by Sandisk, since they've supposedly got the best spread for less bread. The whole upside of SSDs is that there's no seek time. A standard hard disk has to drive the voice coil to move the read/write head to the proper track on the disk, whereas an SSD just reads from the appropriate memory address. If one file is at the beginning of a hard drive, and another is at the end, there will be a slight delay while it 'seeks' to that location. Not so with an SSD. A to Z without skipping a beat. Also, because of no moving parts they're super rugged and consume less power...

If it were me I'd totally choose XP over Vista. The upshoot is that since Vista is such a resource hog, any computer that is designed to run Vista decently will just scream while running XP. The hard part when downgrading is trying to find all the drivers you need if the manufacturer decides not to provide XP versions.

http://www.driveyourlaptop.com/

 

[joe tedesco]

Thanks Rick

The new machine will have Window XP installed, and it comes with Microsoft Office Professional. I ordered the combo plane, car, and electrical charger. I hope to receive it by the end of the week. This makes probably my 20th machine, the first being a TRS 80, and then the IBM that had a HD drive that was just enough for the basic Dos and simple text we used to write the IAEI News, and the first copy of the Soares Book on Grounding revised.

Man time sure passes us by. I have to look for my old Mac Computer, I will take it to the Apple Store and trade it in for one of those new thin machines, I hope? :wink:

Anyone interested in starting a NEC and Electrical Group, meeting in the Boston area?

Have laptop will travel we could also work on new proposals for the 2011 NEC and share the special links we find related to our interests.

 

[HighWirey]

What can I expect with a 32 GB Solid State HD installed in a Dell 630?
How does it work and can I expect better service along with the Windows XP instead of Vista?
What equipment do you use to present your seminars?

Thankfully I do not do office presentations anymore.

You can expect Vista to absorb about 30 gigs of it. The balance is yours to squander.

Best Wishes Everyone

 

[JohnJ0906]

I threw mine away in 1992! Have been using computers since then. I thought the new Solid State drive would be something new for me to try out. I have a closet full of gadgets and materials I used for training. Hard to believe that I can carry all of the filles, and videos I need on a thumb drive that I can now plug into my projector. Who's coming to Arlington, VA or Glen Burnie, MD?

Glen Burnie? When?

 

[joe tedesco]

Glen Burnie? When?

I sent you a PM, plan on the happy hour if you do come!

 

[electricmanscott]

This makes probably my 20th machine, the first being a TRS 80,

Ha Ha I guess that was my first machine too. Although It was owned by the Somerville Public School System and not me. I think I was in 6th grade.

All I knew how to do was play Oregon trail. I was not particularly good at it either.

 

[joe tedesco]

Ha Ha I guess that was my first machine too. Although It was owned by the Somerville Public School System and not me. I think I was in 6th grade.

All I knew how to do was play Oregon trail. I was not particularly good at it either.

I was able to print out about 8 pages of text from it for my handouts, and along with 35 mm slide trays did my presentations, and discussed the NEC when it was just a small book then.

No fancy media or bells and whistles. Now I am almost ready to use my iPhone or iPodTouch to present my stuff.

I probably should stop spending so much money, but for me gadgets are fun. I always wanted that Dick Tracy watch when I was a kid in NYC!

 

[petersonra]

It will probably work OK.

It probably won't work any faster.

Flash memory uses far less power and there is no motion involved, so one might think they would be more reliable.

We had a customer who thought that and installed a number of them on factory floor units as an experiment. They have hundreds, maybe thousands of PCs being used as operator interfaces and lose a computer once a month or so. Their experience was over time that the flash drives were maybe a little more reliable, but I think one of them failed as well.

Not that it is likely to be an issue, but flash memory has issues as well, and the life span of a flash drive is not infinite. It is not a whole lot more than a hard drive, and hard drives have become very reliable.

IMO, the vast majority of hard drive failures are not actual failures of the drive itself but loss of data, almost always software related.

 

[Pierre C Belarge]

Joe
What projector are you using?
What do you look for in the projector?
I think that with PPT, the projector is more important than the computer...as long as one has a decent speed computer.

 

[joe tedesco]

Joe
What projector are you using?
What do you look for in the projector?
I think that with PPT, the projector is more important than the computer...as long as one has a decent speed computer.

I am using this one:

Toshiba TDP-PX10U Mobile DLP Projector, 2000 ANSI lumens, Native Resolution XGA (1024 x 768), Contrast Ratio 2,000:1, Full 16.7 Million Colors, Projection Screen Size (Diagonal) 35" - 300", Projection Distance 5.3 ft - 39.4 ft, Throw Ratio 1.94 - 2.27:1, 2.9 lbs (TDPPX10U TDP PX10U TDP-PX10 TDPPX10U)

It has a USB port so I can plug in my USB drives, and it is very tiny and makes it easier when passing through the airport screens. I also carry a small backup the size of a small book computer. If I was in trouble I can sign on and get my files online.

I use the WiFi when teaching to show the most popular sites and some of my tricks for finding very useful files not thought to be available on the INTERNET -- it is all there!

 

[Rampage_Rick]

IMO, the vast majority of hard drive failures are not actual failures of the drive itself but loss of data, almost always software related.

I have a box of about 20 dead hard drives that I'm currently using as a footrest (No joke... It's a foam shipping case with slots for 20 drives, why keep it on a shelf?) We're not talking bad sectors either... They're all totally unusable. One has to keep in mind that computers generally have only 2 moving components: hard drives and fans. It'll run without a fan (at least for a while ;^) but not without a hard drive. Worst failure was 3 drives simultaneously out of a 16-drive RAID, due to the failure of 2 fans within the span of half an hour. That event probably cost $15k in downtime, repairs, and data recovery. After that they never questioned my recommendations.

I've got another one that'll probably throw an infarc any day now. It's been progressively logging errors for a couple weeks. It's a non critical system and I'm too busy to replace it. Besides, i haven't been budgeted for proactive drive replacement :grin:

-edit- The other thing I forgot to mention was that it's supposed to knock the ball out of the park if your windows swapfile runs from an SSD... Likely due to the faster access/seek times.

 

[dbuckley]

The problem with flash disks is that they wear out. Flash can only be written a given number of times, typically 100,000. The flash disk firmware will move stuff around on the flash to get the best out of it, a process called levelling, but it will eventually wear out. But before it does it'll work just fine.

I have two Carousel projectors! I use them for theatrical purposes, but they absolutely rock. Now that the world uses LCD projectors and laptops you can pick up Carousels projectors fairly cheaply...

 

[Rampage_Rick]

The problem with flash disks is that they wear out.

I'm familiar with this phenominon with standard Compact Flash memory cards. I've got a linux machine (IPcop) that boots from a 512MB CF card plugged into the primary ATA port. I made some minor modifications so that logfiles and such are written once an hour rather than continuously, other than that it's no different. The flash technology and underlying longevity is being developed further every day.

"a pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn't reach the theoretical write limit."

If there is a flaw with SSDs it's regarding encryption and security, particularly due to aspects such as wear-leveling. :read:

The fact of the matter is that magnetic platter hard drives also wear out, in so fact that I've seen more hard drive failures than any other PC component (cheap power supplies are next, but at roughly half the rate)

 

[jrannis]

Thanks Rick

The new machine will have Window XP installed, and it comes with Microsoft Office Professional. I ordered the combo plane, car, and electrical charger. I hope to receive it by the end of the week. This makes probably my 20th machine, the first being a TRS 80, and then the IBM that had a HD drive that was just enough for the basic Dos and simple text we used to write the IAEI News, and the first copy of the Soares Book on Grounding revised.

Man time sure passes us by. I have to look for my old Mac Computer, I will take it to the Apple Store and trade it in for one of those new thin machines, I hope? :wink:

Anyone interested in starting a NEC and Electrical Group, meeting in the Boston area?

Have laptop will travel we could also work on new proposals for the 2011 NEC and share the special links we find related to our interests.

First Computer: Timex/Sinclair 1000. Bought it at Sears. I dont remember what the display was.

 

[dbuckley]

The fact of the matter is that magnetic platter hard drives also wear out, in so fact that I've seen more hard drive failures than any other PC component

No disagreement there. Google published an interesting paper on hard disk failures, based on their work with rather a lot of disks: DF:

If there is a flaw with SSDs it's regarding encryption and security, particularly due to aspects such as wear-leveling. :read:

If you need data on disk encrypted, then the only generic way I'm (currently) trusting to be decently secure is by using Stonewood Electronics Encrypted Disks. My stance on this may change in time, but right now, thats where I stand.

Edited to note that if you really do want speed and security, then you can still get true RAM disks, which have no write cycle limitations and thus don't level. They have battery backup, and of course if you need instant data destruction you just need a mechanism to deprive the thing of power and it gets total amnesia. OK, so the NSA may be able to get the stuff back using electron microscopy and other funky tools, but then the data is still encrypted and that needs to be unwound as well, so that would have to be pretty valuable data for a state agency to go to that much trouble

 

[jerm]

and it gets total amnesia.

It's a misnomer that RAM looses everything as soon as the power is lost. It can take up to 35 seconds for the data to decay!
Cryogenically frozen RAM bypasses all disk encryption methods

 

[tom baker]

I just purchased a new Dell Latitude D630 from Dell, windows XP Home, no need for Vista, many programs don't work with it. the Dell has a special hard drive that detects if its dropped and shuts it off.
In liu of a SD HD I would look at a ruggized laptop, although the Latitude is the business line and is better than the Inspiron (it still has a serial port)
I use a boxlight projector (main office in my county). I purchased a spare lamp a few years back and it was $500. the projector is extra bright and has a wide angle lens.
the most important tools I have are:
1. Gyroremote remote control, I can program buttons to pop up graphics, such as a violation sign, picture of a company truck, count down timers, and a pointer I can draw on the screen with.
2. Crystal Graphics-this software allows me to use full motion dissolves, transitions and other neat stuff.

With my remote I can sit back from the laptop and run it, it works as a mouse.

I got mike holt started on powerpoint in 1999, used an overhead projector before that. gave my first projector (which I won as a door prize) and laptop to habitat for humanity.