On Tue, January 5, 2016 3:50 pm, Warren Young wrote:
On Jan 4, 2016, at 8:37 PM, Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
On Mon, January 4, 2016 6:18 pm, John R Pierce wrote:
On 1/4/2016 4:03 PM, tdukes@palmettoshopper.com wrote:
I have an old IBM Netvista.
10 to 15 years old? its 5 to 10 years past expected EOL. You got your moneys worth.
Hm. I had to retire a few 10 years old servers and a few 13 years old workstations. But they still were alive (what a shame to retire something that still works!)
I donât think John is saying that on the first day of the machineâs sixth year that thou shalt throw the machine away.
Rather, be happy that it gave well over the 3-5 year use life you should have budgeted for from the start.
Certainly, I always agree to happily get from hardware longer life - when hardware gives it.
Between the lower power draw of the replacement over its expected lifetime, the time taken to diagnose it, the parts required to fix it, and the time required to replace those parts, youâve probably spent more than the cost of a new machine.
Luckily, I rarely have to repair machines during their life (which is almost always longer than expected life before it becomes obsolete). In part, saving on lack of need of spending time and other resources on diagnostics and repair comes in our case, as in everybody's else, from paying slightly more initially and getting definitely very good hardware. But if the machine is obsolete, when it finally dies, everybody feels relief. But before it dies, it is getting re-purposed for easier task (which are always many in every server room).
That leaves out the increased productivity from running on a faster, more featureful machine.
And yes, there is downside in keeping older hardware around: wasting precious server room space, power, AC. Well, there no harmony in this World ;-)
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++