Dan on the state of hardware upgrades

[rajagra]

went to upgrade a friends tiny pc. all I wanted to do it was upgrade the std cd writer to a dvd writer. The case was so badly designed and not meant for upgrading that I had to take everything out of the case(PSU, Mobo etc) then fiddle for about half an hour to get the old drive out then install the new one.

He, he. Reminds me of a time a few years back when I was a field engineer working on Compaq PCs. They started using a flip up media cage, so you could access devices easily. One day I joined a mate on one of his calls. He didn't know the whole gubbins hinged up, so he had to unscrew the floppy, CD, remove all cables etc. to get at the hard drive to replace it. I only realised once he'd finished why he'd done it that way. You should have seen the look on his face when I pushed the catch and lifted the cage.
My, how we laughed!
(by "we" I mean "me", of course. )

[davidstone28]

What really pisses me off is when manufacturers introduce proprietary parts just for $$$ or try and close an open hardware architecture. Second pet hate is the marketing crap and "features" that they and peddle off on the customers (who inevitably get sucked into the marketing bling) - megapixels, megahertz, TFT response times, PSU wattage etc etc. I even heard of one manufacturer saying that the heavier the PSU, the better quality it is and a high powered PSU will make your PC go faster. I kid you not.

[Stoo]

Well, in general terms the heaver the PSU, the more likely it is that it will be of a good quality (*all* the cheap & nasty PSU's I've had the displeasure of coming across have been feather-light compared to the rock-solid ones).

Okay, so the psu=faster pc is mostly bunk (more stable psu = higher overclocks, but that's stretching it rather thin), but you can't win everything

[starbuck]

Tiny had screwed something over the PCI slots to prevent upgrading when I looked at his pc. That was the 1st thing that came off. What is the point of doing something like this anyway? if you are a casual user who doesn't know much about pc's then you wouldn't know where or what to unscrew to upgrade. If you do know what you're doing then you just take off the "guard" or whatever it is by undoing a couple of screws.