[Leica] OT: Old PC, New PC

[Aram Langhans]

Gremlins in your computer.  Hate gremlins.  A few years ago I decided to 
replace my 9 year old computer.   I was going to just upgrade the guts 
of my computer and I have always done that on my own, but in looking 
around, decided (at the time) that we all were all going to die from 
Covid, so I splurged and bought from Puget Systems.  Keep it local in 
Washington.  Not cheap but I went whole hog.  I-9, 128 GB RAM,  Above 
average video card, SSD and the list could go on.  Then after I got it I 
added a few high capacity drives for photos and data.  You might check 
them out and see if they have a system that suits your needs.  They 
produce some truly quality computers so I am sure you would not be 
disappointed.

Aram

On 11/3/2022 11:25 PM, Peter Klein wrote:
> OT but relevant:
> My faithful, almost 10 year-old Dell Optiplex 980 is doing two odd 
> things. I do plan to replace it after Christmas, when (if?) 
> unload-the-inventory sales kick in. But in the meantime:
>
> 1. Whenever the power goes out, I have to crawl under my desk, pull 
> the CMOS battery, and put it back. I can't just hit F2 and fix the 
> configuration because the internal error checks kick in before "Press 
> F2 for setup" happens. They display lights on the PC front that Dell 
> does not document meaningfully. Once CMOS is reset, I find that the 
> date and time are forgotten, and more important, the disk 
> configuration forgets that it is a non-RAID AHCI SSD disk. Once I set 
> those two things straight, all's well. No, it's not the battery, which 
> reads slightly over 3v on my multimeter. And I've replaced the battery 
> twice, with the same results.  Everything else in the BIOS is as I set 
> it previously.
>
> 2. I cloned the original disk to an SSD a couple of years ago. Since 
> then, the PC runs significantly faster in general. But every so often, 
> there is a long hesitation when loading a program, or when switching 
> from one program to another.
>
> Gruesome details: Win10 professional (which was upgraded from Win7, so 
> the registry has all old installation remnants on it).  8 GB RAM, 433 
> GB Crucial SSD system drive with 268 GB free, 1.81 TB conventional HDD 
> data drive with 1.23 TB free. The latter has all my photos on it. The 
> motherboard doesn't have a fast/broad enough path to take full 
> advantage of the SSD, but it still helps. The SSD is trimmed and the 
> HDD data drive is defragged weekly. I back up my data to both an 
> external SSD and a conventional drive regularly.
>
> Questions:
> 1. Anything simple I could do to improve things?
> 2. Recommendations for a new PC?  I've not kept up with hardware in 
> the last few years.
>
> I wouldn't mind something smaller than an under-the-desk tower. I do 
> want 16 GB RAM. I don't need a "screamer" gamer's PC, but low end is 
> too low for me. Aside from the usual Web surfing, writing and email, I 
> do three things with the PC:
>
> * Photo editing, up to 24 GB Raw files.
> * Music composition. Editing is not hugely resource intensive. 
> Playback is comparable to photo editing. I don't do video except to 
> occasionally trim the "dead air" at the beginning and end of a video 
> musical performance.
> * Amateur radio.  Mostly digital signal processing, which is sometimes 
> heavy on the processor, not really taxing the rest of the system much. 
> And my log, which is a SQL light database.
>
> Thanks for any input.
> --Peter
>
-- 
Aram Langhans
(Semi) Retired Science Teacher
& Unemployed photographer
  
“The Human Genome Project has proved Darwin more right than Darwin himself would ever have dared dream.”   James D. Watson