On May 11, Jukka Marin wrote:
> On Sun, May 10, 1998 at 07:05:51PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> > - Intel: there are so many cheap knockoffs it can be hard to find a
> >    decent machine without gaping holes (including security holes), and
> >    said decent machine will be more expensive than the really low end
> >    that makes Intel boxen look so attractive.
> 
> IMHO, the main problem with intel based pc's is lack of reliability.
> My old Sparc 1's (three of them) seem to never crash, but all the pentium
> based systems I maintain (7 or 8 machines) crash every now and then.
> I'd be interested in Alphas myself, but they're quite exotic over here
> and I'm afraid getting spare parts might be slow and expensive.  I guess
> my next machine will be yet another intel pc, but with ECC RAM this time.

  Yep...same experience here.  A big project I'm working on was
started with a bunch of new PCs.  It was cool at first, nice and fast
as long as nobody tried to do *too* much simultaneously...but then the
hardware problems started.  We weren't using cheap stuff either; it
was all big-name boards...We just bought a truckload of Sparc20
systems (running NetBSD/sparc, of course!) to replace 'em.  They
turned out to be on the order of $1000/ea cheaper, and multitasking
performance is much better now, too...

  No offense to NetBSD/i386 intended...but the *hardware* simply isn't
up to it.


                              -Dave McGuire
                               mcguire@neurotica.com