<p>A coworker came into my office to ask about a new Dell laptop that he just bought. He went to order a second battery from an Ebay seller and it wouldn’t fit the laptop. He complained and the Ebay seller pointed to Dell’s website for the model number. Apparently, Dell’s website is wrong as the part that they list for his laptop won’t fit and has different specs.</p>
<p>One thing that spoils me is that power adapters on Apple laptops are usable up and down the age line. The power converter I bought five years ago works on a laptop made today. So we have spare power bricks in various areas.</p>
<p>The only problem that I had with my Sandy Bridge build last year was the manufacturing defect on chipsets. Having an expert help made things a lot easier. I was chatting with my son as my daughter wants a new desktop - I was thinking of building something - Ivy Bridge, 12-16 cores, 32 GB RAM, 8 TB disk, 400 GB of SSD. It could be used as a backup and compute server for the house, also accessible over the internet. I have some computationally-intense stuff that I’d like to work with as does my son.</p>
<p>the reason to use a propritery power supply is that they are really quiet. I have many industry standard ps that the fans sound like a tank and breaks down too often.</p>
<p>It would be much better if you install liquid heat sinking system, that is what I am going to get in the next game machine.</p>
<p>IME, proprietary power supplies…especially ones on consumer-grade and even some low-mid end corporate OEM models are actually more likely to break down than reasonable quality industry standard ATX power supplies. </p>
<p>Moreover, there are industry standard ATX power supplies which are really quiet. </p>
<p>However, I personally prefer to put up with a bit more noise in exchange for better cooling of the power supply unit and to some extent…the system. Power supply units emphasizing “quietness”…especially those on OEMs tend to fail at an alarming rate due to slow/weak fans which causes overheating of the PSUs…along with their tendency to cut corners to improve their margins.</p>
<p>The power supply in an HP desktop that I bought in 2005 died within a year. I didn’t replace the power supply - just got a new computer. And I haven’t purchased anything from HP since. I had a 2003 or 2004 HP laptop and it was great but 2005 is when they started their huge quality slide.</p>
<p>I have a 750 Watt power supply in my current desktop. It’s in a big tower box with several very large and quiet fans. There’s plenty of ventilation too. On custom builds, you can choose whatever level of quality you want. My approach was to get the best components - not the cheapest components so it did cost several times what you could get at Dell or HP. I think that the system cost was about $1,600.</p>
<p>My current PC us on its second power supply… The first one died about four years ago. My parents last two PCs have had their power supplies break too. I’m hoping like has better luck.</p>
<p>Have a corporate NC6220 notebook a client’s D abandoned after I diagnosed a dead hard drive and she didn’t want to replace HDD because she wanted an apple anyways. Still runs fine to this day after a hard drive replacement…even ran Mac OSX86 leopard on it for a bit. </p>
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<p>Mom’s first desktop had its first AT power supply fail after just 3 years of heavy usage by her and myself in the late '90s. Ended up taking that desktop up with me to college to tinker with it and after replacing it with another PSU…used it heavily for another 3 years before my supervisor gave me a p233MMX based IBM Aptiva courtesy of his former startup. </p>
<p>Used to use that old desktop to play mp3s while doing some programming/QA testing of corporate website from home, batch downloading of songs via napster overnight, and even downloading ISOs of sample/shareware versions provided by corporations like Oracle.</p>
<p>I stopped using the old HP as it had a weak processor besides the power supply and and Dell had an incredible sale on new desktops. I could have replaced the power supply but it was a labor vs money thing and I want with saving labor.</p>
<p>I like playing around with the new instruction sets on new processors - keeps me current for those hardware optimization tasks. I’ve been playing around with SSE4.2 and want to play with AVX next - I only have one system that supports AVX. Haswell has AVX2 which I haven’t even looked at yet though I’m looking forward to the string instructions moving from 128 bits to 256 bits.</p>
<p>Sigh… My last custom build was an awesome machine that was optimized for video editing, (Gigabyte board, Intel quad core processor, pair of 10k RPM Velociraptors). Now I prefer the convenience of Shuttle barebone systems. Add drives, processor, memory, repeat every 2-3 years, 20-30 minutes to assemble. My current is a Shuttle quad core AMD with SSD boot + Velociraptor 300gb + BluRay DVD + video editing card. Will probably pass it on to DD2 and build another Shuttle.</p>
<p>Cooling is a bit of a problem in Shuttles but nothing insurmountable. </p>
<p>Fendergirl is right on, Gigabyte is about he best quality mainboard there is, my last few builds were all Gigabytes, Antec cases, and Intel CPU’s.</p>
<p>I’m hoping the cooling is ok. It seems to run pretty cool - and quiet!!! My old PC was so loud I thought it was going to take off the ground like a helicopter!</p>
<p>I have the fan that came on the processor and a case fan as well. It’s in the open so it’s pretty ventilated - not stuffed in a desk with walls on both sides or anything.</p>
<p>Was this the Pentium 4 you referenced earlier in the thread?</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, is your nickname derived from that of a certain iconic electric guitar company? :)</p>
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<p>Personally, I’m partial to ASUS…though I’ve heard great things about gigabyte as well. </p>
<p>Don’t really care for small form factored desktop/tower PCs. IMHO…if you really need the space…you may as well get a notebook PC. </p>
<p>Especially given the fact many small-form factor PCs use laptop parts like hard drives, RAM, peripherals to save space and have similar/worse cooling issues.</p>