coppercitymt wrote:

Is it just me or are 2000 and newer PC's just crap! It seems like they not built as good as older PC's and are broke in some way […]
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Is it just me or are 2000 and newer PC's just crap! It seems like they not built as good as older PC's and are broke in some way or another. Every system made 1999 and older seems to be well built last forever and just plain works no matter what you throw at it.

My two dells one is a Dimension 4100 (Early 2001) P III 933 the other a XPS D266 PII (1997). The newer one has a problem that I can't make go away even down to swapping motherboards out, any time you start Direct-x related things it just freeze's, the windows 3D screen savers just freeze it will randomly lock up and get stuck on a sound in Half-life, and it's just plain slow. Same thing on both 98 and ME. Up to date drivers and DX 8.0. Won't even let me start Dxdia program (in program files).

On the other hand the PII 266 plays everything fine and dandy.

So out in the shed the other dell will sit, if it don't want to play nice. I sometimes wonder why I even mess with these systems. Just scrap them all ;-(

Every hardware manufacturer has made good and lesser parts.
Your system will be as stable as the individual parts you use in them.

I've build plenty rigs post-2000 and all are wonderfully stable.
And a couple pre-2000 rigs have given me trouble.

I know lots of people who have been on PCs of the 2000-2003 vintage until recently.

The capacitor plague was obviously a major problem during those years though and killed many a machine.

Capacitors= easily replaced except for a small few once in a while due to ratings. It is all about how they were used and if they were maintained or not. Those that just used theirs without ever bothering to clean them or check things out once and a while really had things worse than those who did a better job of keeping their rigs in good shape. New drives and power supplies do make a huge difference in these post 2000 era machines. When caps go bad it is best to replace them early on before they make things worse. Power supplies don't tolerate bad caps much at all and is one reason a lot of these machines stopped working. Boards and graphics cards are much more tolerant.

Sure you can repair it but it's just more time and money down the drain. My point was that 1999-2004 or so was a period with a lot of unreliable hardware because of the defective capacitor problem.

There's also the "2000-2004 hard drives suck" problem too

Seems like ever since they started outsourcing manufacturing to China they've all turned to crap. 😜 I still have a Japanese-made Toshiba T4600C laptop from 1993 and it still runs like a charm. This was back when Toshiba actually built quality products. But yes jackleg component manufacturers using cost-cutting methods can really hurt the industry. But hey, if you have access to a soldering iron and know a couple things about fixing computers then it can go a long way.

I guess you can always go with the "conspiracy theory" that manufacturers only make it last a certain number of years so that you, the consumer will have to go back and buy again when it breaks (OK, it's not actually a conspiracy theory - it's common sense and practice for a business in order to stay profitable - they don't need to design something to last forever, just enough so that the end user eventually will desire to upgrade/replace the product... which explains the usually-limited warranty). Most cars are only designed to get you through just maybe 5 guaranteed years of trouble-free usage. After that, you're on your own and the manufacturer could care less what happens to it. They don't design it for problem-free operation beyond that point. Of course, you have the skills to fix any problems, then all the better to you.

So all in all, it's just a gigantic circle of necessary evils.

Conspiracy it is then... 😖

http://www.green-blog.org/2011/06/13/the-ligh … ulb-conspiracy/

bestemor wrote:

Conspiracy it is then... 😖

http://www.green-blog.org/2011/06/13/the-ligh … ulb-conspiracy/

Used to be able to find it on youtube but copyright trolling is an huge issue 😢

http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/89006 … d_story_of_Pla/

I managed to buy a pretty crappy PC in 1998 too.
There are a few factors that come to mind, which influence PC reliability the most IMO:
- High currents and resulting Heat, increasing dependance on cooling.
- The Nvidia bad solder issue and The capacitor plague.
- Cheap PSU's, poor grid stability, not earthing/grounding the PC electrically.
- Crappy Motherboard Chipsets or bad Chipset drivers and/or BIOS (ALi/VIA).

Ahh yes, the era of crap hardware. I remember it all too well as I was working as a repair tech back then. It was a combination of several factors and lasted until about 2006 (when the Core CPUs became available)

1. Razor thin margins: 2000 was about the time it became unprofitable to sell any computer hardware unless you made it up in volume. PCs finally became a commodity product and quality went into the toilet.

2. AMD and Intel Mhz war: Most of the chipsets were hastily released as the big two were cranking up the clock speed. Minimal testing was done as stuff was rushed out the door, plus all the heat those CPUs put out wasn't healthy for the crap components they were commonly paired with, which leads to...

3. Faulty capacitors: As if it was bad enough manufacturers were cutting corners using underspec caps to save money, most of them were defective with a flawed electrolyte recipe.

When the Core series came out in 2006ish, things took a turn for the better. We finally got snappy low power CPUs that were fast (P4s weren't all that fast or efficient, took it awhile to beat out the P3!) and those blasted capacitors were finally out of the product stream. Plus components like chipsets weren't as rushed.

We all know how quirky no-name 486 boards were, but hardware from this era was more of a PITA. I recall many a dead Socket A or 478 board (almost all the Socket 423 systems we had on the bench gave up the ghost!), and a fair share of them that would randomly BSOD. It was a pain to diagnose these machines and some were impossible to keep stable. I still have nightmares about VIA 4-in-1 drivers.

As weird as this sounds, I kept on using my circa 1998 Slot 1 440BX based machine until 2008 simply because I didn't want to deal with stability problems on my main machine. The Core2Duo machine that replaced it has been rock solid.

Exactly,
A light in the dark in 2000: you could get your 440BX and a lower speed Coppermine Pentium III, windows 2K and get your work done. And they are still nice to have now, because they support DOS so well and have ISA slots for DOS sound.

I do consider 2000 to be the technical High Water Mark for Microsoft. With Windows 2000 and office 2000. After that they did not really "improve" things, they just changed things and added things, IMO.

That 440BX rig is still running as a MP3 streaming machine with its PIII-550Mhz. I had to replace the AOpen AX6B+ motherboard that was in it, but I had another BX board on hand (Supermicro P6SBA) to throw in.

how did the Aopen AX6B+ die?

Since I have more room I expanded my i440BX collection to 5 different boards: Soyo SY-6BA+III, Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev 2, Aopen AX6BC, Intel SR440BX, Shuttle HOT-661 rev 1.1.

Its been awhile, but it was either a bad power supply or a power surge. One day it decided to never POST again. I also recall the Antec power supply going bad around the same time. The board didn't have any bad caps on it.

The AX6B+ was a NICE board for the time. 4 DIMM slots and built in Adaptec AIC-7880 UW SCSI. Only 4 PCI slots though, I could have really used the 5th slot the AX6BC came with vs. the extra ISA slot. IRQs were also tight since the onboard SCSI shared with PCI slot 4. I have to juggle cards around to get the SB Live! happy on its own IRQ, plus keep IRQ 5 open for the DOS emulation. Annoyingly, AOpen stopped supplying BIOS updates for it long before the AX6BC. It gave me close to 8 years of service, so I really couldn't complain when it died.