I know I'm frugal but

[Gypsy]

No laptops don't last as long, because they are usually (not always) built for lightness, rather than durability. In my company, laptops usually have a max life of 3 years and then they get replaced, while desktops can last 4 years before being replaced. And to be honest, a laptop at 3 years is usually already a crappy one, probably having gone through a hard drive replacement or something else.

I've always had laptops, my father got started me on them and I've only had a desktop once. I like being able to move around... sit on the couch or in bed or at a desk. When I lived in smaller places (like studios or one bedrooms apts) I could be happy with a desktop because chances were my living room was my tv room/office/kitchen area too.

I have both Mac and PCs now.

[smilingcat]

Finally have my new machine. I've always bought piecemeal computer and I have always put it together and loaded the operating system myself.

This computer is tad different in that its not your regular home computer. And I just can't afford it not to work. It has to work. It has to load up the operating system and work. Just too expensive not to work.

Finally, I've got the operating system loaded up and it looks like its okay. Whew!!
Nerve rattling always when working at "bleeding edge" of technology. You never know if it is going to work or not.

This machine will be good for 15 years or more I hope. My last machine which I will be retiring has lasted since 1992 or 1993. I found a box with manuals and dates on some of the recipts.

[Irulan]

um, what makes it so special?

just replaced a 5 year old desktop with a win7 pro 64 bit w/ i5 processor w/8gigs of RAM. (desktop)It wasn't terribly expensive and it was built by a local place. I love custom/local builds, no crap ware to delete.

[Biciclista]

yeah i want to know what is so special about your new computer ??
congrats anyway.

[smilingcat]

geekoid fact sheet:

dual xeon westmere processors with 6 cores each hyper thread enabled of course.

48G 1333Mhz DDR3 registered + ECC
Have enough memory socket to get to nearly 200G of DDR3 main memory.

4 slots of PCIe 2.0 x16 + other PCIe slot
1Tbyte of RAID 1E with 6Gb/Sec SATA (hot swappable drives only 4 installed)
150G SATA 6G/Sec HD for the OS

currently have a Nvidia graphics card with Fermi to run Cuda and Open CL. This is to be replaced by Tesla C2050 or C2070 when the Nvidia GPU's are found compatible with the system. Looks like it is.

dual 1400W power supply also hot swappable
two channels of 1Gb/sec Ethernet
about 10 USB channels of which 2 or 4 are USB3.
The system is considered a very high end enterprise grade. Can fit on a std rack as a 4U box. the system weighs over 100 pounds right now.

Speed of the system is rated as a 24th fastest for intel or amd based computer. This is the front end computer. Back end will be the Tesla C2050 GPU based super computer. typical home computer may do 2 billion floating point calculations per sec, 2Gflops. My eventual system will do nearly 1 thousand billion floating point calculations at twice the precision 1Tflop. The performance level puts in a class of super computer or high performance computing HPC.

The computer will be connected to a two UPS/power conditioner.
Total cost when I am finished with the upgrade will be enough to buy a brand new car.

My last computer was a very high end at the time. That is why it managed to last so long. When Redhat 4.0 came out I tried it and wasn't too thrilled with 4.0.

I have a need for this kind of performance to run engineering software. It's not for photoshop, gaming.

[shootingstar]

geekoid fact sheet:

Yea, really smilingcat.

Congrats. on your computer. May it last beyond...your retirement.

[Irulan]

Can you depreciate it as a bsiness expense?