Any one still using P4? How did you kept them running all these years? This is a post I shared on overclock.net, might be interesting for some of you fellow geeks : ) While most user think P4s belong inside a museum now...But I have 12 P4s running adequately as Point of Sale (POS) systems in three restaurants where I am a partner. All of them have been running 24hr/day, 7days a week since summer of 2005 8-). All were build with ASUS p4bp-MX and p4s800-MX (MX models have build-in graphic chip & configurable shared memory) in Micro ATX enclosures with small fans. All are running W2k with ELO touch screens. They are set to turn off hard disks and monitors when inactive. The units would not reliably wake up from Standby / Sleep ...or do it fast enough for the busy server to loose patients. Its funny telling my under clock story on Overclock.net. Initially, they came with 2.66/2.8 ghz socket 478 Celeron chips, they were cooking the capacitors in the small PSU and the PSUs felt pretty hot by touch. Its studied that higher temperatures significantly reduce component service life. In the following two years, I replaced all CPU with SL668 1.6A Northwood units that I learned it performed better while having much lower power consumption...The 1.6A with larger cache memory allowed smooth video (most none HD youtube stuff) playback while the 2.66 Celeron did not. I think the slower bus speed cooled other components too. CPU swap lowered the temps significantly and PSUs just felt slightly warm afterwards. Regular maintenance on these units kept them alive for 8 years with very little cost. All of these procedures have tutorials on Youtube. 1, Every year, clean and blow out dusts from CPU and PSU fans and case before summer. You wouldnt believe the dusts accumulation in a restaurant environment. Units would start resetting itself or become real slow during busy hours if left uncleaned for 15 months. 2, Every two years, remove the CPU, PSU and any case fans for better cleaning. Open the back covers of the fans and put 1 or 2 drops of oil into the sleeve bearing if they looked dry. Within seconds, the oil should be sucked into the bearing & reservoir. Use a toilet paper to suck out excess oil and tape close the covers. I just use same synthetic motor oil for my car and only needed 2 ounce for the hundred computers I worked on the past 25 years... BTW, the newer fan design do not have easy access to the bearings, taking them apart will likely damage the fan. Buying a new CPU fan means youll wast a perfectly fine heat sink. 3, While inside the PSU and case, inspect all capacitors for leaking, bulging on top or pushed out rubber plug at the bottom. Replace them promptly will reduce damage to other components. Buying them on eBay from China seems to be the cheaper route. $0.25 vs $2 from Radio Shark ... I meant Shack :) 4, Replace hard drives when they become noisy. But some units will fail without any warning. I did all of the maintenance myself, and replaced the following parts in 8 years: 5 motherboards, got 3 new from a company kept them as spare parts, 2 used ones, around $35 each shipped. Some MB parts (disk controller, printer port, serial ports) failed after extensive use. Others just died without warning (failure to boot/post) while caps appeared in good shape. I didnt have a ESR meter to check capacity at that time. ~$200 9 hard drives. Yes, 3 are still running on original Western Digital WD400 HD! Only 5 of them actually died and became totally unusable. Some no longer detected and some developed excessive bad sectors and or bearings became too loud. Two crushed HD recovered after format and partition. The lesser noisy ones are kept as cloned backup inside the case, unplugged. Servers got preemptive replacement and have second drive installed for routine backups. From working with these 20-80g PATA units, WD drives had 30% longer service life compare to Maxtor ... maybe due to the fact I used the better quality black units from WD. Buy only new sealed units from reputable seller! The drive I used with the longest service life, A 9 gig IBM SCSI, which I put into one of the POS machines and still running, I had it since Y2k! ~$350 total 12 PSUs. All of machines are on their second PSU, some served as long as 7 years with regular clean and lube job. 3 died suddenly and I changed the rest when they feel hot to the touch or when the machine start to shut down / restart for no reason. In the past, just for learning, I rescued few PSUs by replacing caps, but it didnt work all the time since the units run pretty hot, other parts quit too. PSUs are cheap and have too many caps to replace to worth the efforts. I got them at Frys at $20 each. ~$250 8 case fans. Most units had 2 small fans, after I started oiling the fans 6 years ago, only 2 got replaced due to vibration. ~$70 12 CPUs. In 8 years of none stop running, only 2 RAM modules died. Unlike on the ASUS P4C800, the POS motherboards did not allow slowing CPU speed :-( The 12 CPUs were purchased to under clock the machines. While the chance of killing a overclocked CPU is very high (Ive killed one out of three I overclocked), Ive never heard a lower power / under clocked and properly cooled CPU failed in a office environment in 25yr as software engineer & part-time computer tech. ~$150 For around $1000, I kept 12 P4 machines running none stop for 8 years. If I upgraded to faster machine, Ill have to upgrade POS software too, with software licensing, installation labor and other cost, I may have to pay $1200 for each machine. Merchants are required to keep transactions for 7 years. If the new POS cant load the old archived files, I have to keep a old POS alive anyway. The newer ones may have solid caps with extended service life, but more power means more heat => shorter life. New fans are not as easy to work on. A refurb MB and HD are only ~$30 for P4 machines today. I may have to get converters and SSDs to extend the POS service life. I know I dont have the longest machine in service record because just two years ago, in 2011, while shopping in a Vacaville outlet, I saw a older technician working on a POS which he pulled from under a cabinet... It was a IBM PC from the 1980s, running Dbase 3 / Foxpro application on DOS, on a 12 amber monochrome IBM monitor!! Brings back old memories... My first paid software project was a Dbase 3 application for the CA Fish & Game while I was in CSUS ;-) With robust build quality, low power requirement, low heat (many CPU from 80s didnt need a FAN), plenty of old parts around... some merchants just couldnt find the reason to change what had served them well for so many years. Some are forced to upgrade hardware because parts are no longer available. In fact, I know a guy thats being paid to setup DOS POS running in virtual machines. Just take a peek of the screens on your next visit to DMV, mose likely still a text terminal displaying outputs from a Cobol system developed in the 1970s. Happy computing !! Bill
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:41:01 +0000
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