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glcoakley

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OLD CPUs

Folks,

I have a much older Compaq machine that is running Windows 2000 with a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drives as well as an old SCSI drive.  It is networked for external access. I keep the system mainly for utilizing the floppy drives.  

My question: should I ever turn the machine off?  I want to maximize the life of the old system, so which is better - turning it on/off as needed or simply allow it to remain on, darn near forever?  It's been running 24/7 for quite a few years and I'm tempted to just let it continue.  Yeah, I reboot it now and then, but the power stays on - even thru blackouts, with my UPS and backup generator.

Opinions?

Gary L. Coakley
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Dr. Klahn

The thing that fails most often in an old system is the electrolytic capacitors.  No matter how well the system is treated -- left on or turned off -- the caps are eventually going to fail.  They're the only electronic component that I can think of that uses water in the composition. Because the caps get anywhere from warm to hot during operation, the water slowly evaporates out and eventually they fail.

Caps fail most often when a system is turned on or turned off and a transient punctures the oxide film on the foil.  So strictly speaking I suppose leaving the system on is the best policy.  However, if the system dates from Windows 2000 it probably has caps from the Great Capacitor Plague era and it's living on borrowed time anyway.

If you want to keep it around, send the motherboard off to one of the companies that does re-capping and pay the hundred bucks or so to have it re-capped.  It should then be good for another 15 years.  In this case buying an identical replacement motherboard on fleabay is not a solution because the caps will probably be in equally bad shape.

Side note:  Yes, re-capping can supposedly be done by any electronic hobbyist.  I've not been able to do it successfully with my own equipment.  A lot of heat is required to get through a via on a multi-layer board and by the time the cap comes loose, the board is cooked and delaminates around the via.  Try it on a scrap motherboard sometime to see.
My suggestion is to leave it powered on if power consumption is not an issue. And if you want to turning it on/off as needed you might as well get the scrap part from ebay just in case the server did not power on one day.

The OS running on the server is out of date and you might be vulnerable to attack since the server is mainly for external access, I'll advise to be switching it on/off when needed if you can not transfer the application to a newer OS.

Regards
If you fear moving to newer hardware there is always the system preparation tool (sysprep) that you can use to prepare an image of the workstation for burning onto another workstation.

You may also consider converting the physical machine to a vm instead.

-saige-
I've always been told that they worst thing you can do to a computer is turn it on. It's because of all that electricity surging through there at once. If something is weak, that's the moment it's going to break. Think about it sort of like a light bulb. They most often go out when you flip the switch.

As for how long it will keep running, it's hard to say. I do think older PC's had better components than a lot of newer stuff, but as Dr. Klahn said the capacitors are going to be the first thing to go out on you.
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Gary Case
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... also note that there are several free "Virtual Floppies" that you can install on a modern system and mount old floppy images created with WinImage => so you likely never actually would need a physical floppy drive.

UNLESS, of course, you're actually still using these drives to write new data to -- and if that's the case you should change your process to save all of your new data on a hard drive or a USB flash drive.
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I don't know if I have enough nerve ( yet ) to totally do away with my "floppy capability", but it is really looking like a ( paid ) task for one of my grandkids to Winimage all of my hundreds of floppies.

I really appreciate all of the insights!
Understand -- I have (actually HAD) well over 2,000 floppies, but ~ a decade or so ago I spent a few days making images of all of them, and could then access any of them from any modern system without the need for a physical drive.

I had all 3 sizes -- 8", 5.25",  and 3.5"  => and now just have a folder called "Floppy Archives" that has 3 subfolders -- "Floppies 1 (8 inch)",  "Floppies 2 (5.25 inch)", and "Floppies 3 (3.5 inch)".    Each of those folders has, of course, images of all of my old floppies in them (often also organized into subfolders if there were multiple floppies for a particular program/OS/etc.).

For example, an old copy of Harvard Graphics had 10 disks plus clipart and graphics symbols disk -- so if I look at  S:\Floppy Archives\Floppies 3 (3.5 inch)\Harvard Graphics  there are 12 disk images [Disk1, Disk2, ..., Disk10, Clipart, Symbols]

It is, of course, RARE that I actually access these -- but I'm a committed packrat, so anything I could save digitally I have done so over the years.    Even after I did all that with my floppies, it was several years later before I actually dumped my 8" floppy drives and the disks themselves (I did finally do that several years ago).    I also got rid of all my 5.25" floppies, although I still have a bare drive in my "junk collection" (not connected to a PC).

Imaging all of the floppies isn't really a hard task -- but it does take some time.    Typically 3-4 minutes/floppy once you get the hang of it.   So you could easily do 10-15 floppies/hr ... or perhaps 100 floppies in a dedicated day spent organizing them.    Very little of "your time" -- mostly just waiting a few minutes for each image to complete.    And of course you want to organize how you store them and what you name the images.     If you did perhaps 50 floppies/day I'd think you'd find it's not really all that hard a task.

Note also that floppies deteriorate with time -- you may very well find that some of your old disks can no longer be read ... which is a good reason to save them all as image files, since once you have them in digital form on your hard drive it's very easy to backup the copies, and hard drives (and USB flash drives) are FAR more reliable than the floppies.
... and, of course, you don't have to "do away" with your floppy capability OR your floppies while you're archiving them in images => but once you had that done, I suspect you'd start thinking about it.    As I mentioned above, I still held on to a few boxes full of floppies for several years even after I didn't need them -- but did eventually toss them out in one of my "damn, I've really got to clean up this room" frenzies :-)
i even imaged many floppies on a cd; usually the bootable ones with some tools
so i had several boxes of floppies reduced to 1 CD
I had too many to fit on a single CD, but they all easily fit on a DVD or a flash drive.   All of my images total ~ 1.5GB.
yep - good old days, when programs were small...
now you need a software of sevaral mbytes to drive a nail in the wall so to speak