These Dell’s are NOT “beautiful” or “elegant”- they just WORK. If you want to shell out $1,500 to have a computer that looks “cool,” by all means, buy the Mac.

I’m fine with spending $800 every few years for a basic Dell PC- it won’t “impress” anyone, but it gets the job done- and I’ll invest the difference.

This message written on an ugly vintage (2004) Dell Optiplex desktop that my employer gave me when they upgraded a couple of years back- it’s ugly, it’s dusty, and it’s still chugging along, and that works just fine for me…

Have you ever checked out http://www.zoho.com?

They are another online suite of editing tools that work really well. I use them myself and have had pretty good success. It even allows you to post directy to a blog images and all.

P.S. You don’t even have to sign up for a free account. You can simply sign in using your gmail account credentials.

Never blow air into them!

The vac will pull out any loose dust or dust bunnies. Blowing air into the vents will cause dust and bunnies to lodge under chips and other places which will reduce airflow.

Reduced airflow=increased heat= dead puppy!

Canned compressed air is okay on desktops.
Flatscreen monitors of course it is not!

Try this and see if your next system doesn’t last longer.

I assume you run disk cleanup, defrag, cleaning the temp files in your browser.

You do use a U.P.S. to prevent not only spikes but also voltage drops that can fry your system to don’t you?

George

I use a Time Capsule and Mozy for backups daily. It will save your butt.

Also #110 your dell with 2g of ram and 250gb hd was $469. It also didn’t include a beautiful 27″ monitor, 1tb HD, and 4gb of ram. I assume you are referring to the 27″ core2 duo imac when you say you could have bought 4 of your dell machines for the price of the mac.

oh…and you didnt get OS X or the iLife suite either. So much for the better deal.

P. S. to J.D. Roth: I used to work for a data recovery company and can give you a hand with recovering your data from your crashed HD. Drop me a line.

http://www1.crashplan.com/consumer/features-timemachine.html#timemachine

I have just uninstalled Mozy. It was causing serious performance problems on my machine. It was using 5% to 100% (yes, 100%) of my CPU even when it was not doing a backup. Once the uninstall finished, my iMac was back to its usual, snappy self.

Mozy’s support responded to my question about this by saying “Mozy and time machine are not compatible…run one or the other”. Um…thanks?

So, I’m back to just running Time Machine. And I’m thinking about CrashPlan.

JD you want something that goes offsite. If there is ever a fire you’re going to lose a lot….local-only backups are only good if there isn’t a disaster.

As to restoring from a service like Mozy or CrashPlan off-site…you have to pick and choose what is most important to recover first given the realities of most home connection speeds. But at least you know the data is out there and encrypted. I highly doubt that in a total disaster your music collection is the first thing you’d worry about recovering but at least you wouldn’t worry that it’s all gone.

Sorry to hear about the bad luck, but congrats on the new 27″ iMac!

As for data backup, I use a combination of Dropbox, Time Machine, Mozy and Evernote.

I use Time Machine to back everything up occasionally (I don’t like using it every hour because it slows performance even on my new iMac), then Mozy backs up only my business directories every morning for some redundancy.

For less than $18/month, I can make sure all of my crucial business files are safe (Mozy), protect the bigger files that don’t change as often (iPhoto, iTunes, etc.) with Time Machine, and keep everything synced and backed up with Dropbox. Evernote is just an awesome bonus.

Maybe a combination of Time Machine & Mozy (Personal & Business) would help?

Also, Dropbox has been working on their “non-Dropbox” syncing for a long time now, and they’re saying it will be released soon, so it might be best just to wait and upgrade to a plan with more storage since you’ll be able to select any directories/files from your computer (up to 100GB), even outside the Dropbox folder!

Well, thanks for all of your fantastic posts. Your blog has been an inspiration to me, and I’ll keep reading every post.

Take care,
Kyle

———————
Also, what’s the cost? I see that it’s cheap for small amounts of data, but if I’m doing my math right, it’s going to cost me $100+ per month to back up 200gb of data. That’s too much. Or can I use the MozyHome account for a business?
———————-

I use a Mac as my primary computer because Mac OS has bootable backup systems that I’ve never seen for Windows. I have the following levels of protection for my data:

1. SuperDuper! and an external USB drive means nightly bootable backups. I have had two internal hard drives die on me, and each time, I was back to work in less than 5 minutes by booting to my external drive.

2. I have a git repository to store my most important business and personal documents. I started with Subversion, then switched to hg, and now to git. I commit changes to my git repository at least at the end of every task, and often more frequently, so I usually risk losing no more than about 1/2 day’s worth of work. This gives me a local backup in case I accidentally delete a file or some software somewhere corrupts a file for me. I have six years’ history in this repository, which came in handy during my last tax audit.

3. I “push” my git repository to an online server I host with Slicehost. After I complete each task, and at the end of the work day, I send my changes to the online repository. This gives me my first online backup.

4. I use JungleDisk and Amazon S3 to back up my git repository working area every 15 minutes while connected to the internet. This gives me another online backup, and this one into the cloud. I also back up other key files that don’t fit into a versioning system, like my 1Password keychain.

I have tried Time Machine and don’t find it particularly useful, so I typically don’t bother with it.

My backup system costs about $500/year with about $3000 startup cost (including the MacBook Pro and external hard disk), but I’ve never had to spend more than 5 minutes recovering from disk failure. I’ve also never recovered from disk failure on Windows in less than a day. It’s well worth the price for me.

There are other options out there that provide better coverage (SquareTrade, for one)

My current macbook has been plugging for 4 years. I had to replace the hard drive in it this winter, but that was way cheaper than getting a whole new computer. It still works just like new. I back it up every couple of months or whenever I put on photos that I don’t want to lose. Plus, replacing the HD was super easy. The only thing actually falling apart on my computer is the case itself; those white plastic cases are prone to cracking after a year or two because of the magnetic clasp. I’ve had the plastic replace once, but now I’m out of applecare, so I just tape up the cracking part.

Maybe you just got a bad laptop? I’d definitely stick with applecare, as they’ll help you out for a whole 3 years, which is longer than computers are lasting you right now.

You get 2GB Free and i find its great for essential text-based files which don’t take up much space or bandwith.

My 2006 imac, smoked its psu late in 2008, I didn’t give up until I had it fixed, on their bill of course, and it has now been ticking another year and half, and being stubborn saved me $1K.

Not sure what the US customer rights are like. But here in commie Sweden, you’ve got a 3 year factory fault guarantee which comes in handy for stuff like this.

I remember my first call to the retailer… “yes, but is IS two and half years old you know..”. I almost hung up. I have a 20(!) year old Apple LC that boots up just fine. Different times I guess.

It’s like taking your car into the mechanic because it’s not running: is it not starting? Is it not running? Is it not going into gear? Are the tires missing? HUGELY different things.

I buy about 15 computers/year for work. The PCs go on and on and on and the Macs almost always die before their time or require repairs. Sure, we get applecare, but taking them to the “genius bar” is irritating at best. Apple only just started offering our company on-site repair. We’ve had that from Dell for years. You have to wonder why. Probably because their computers aren’t as durable as Dells.

Based on my experience at work, I would never buy one for home.

Just in my own personal experience, Mac has been the best computer I’ve ever had. I got this one in Spring 07, and it’s going good with no sign of collapse (knock on wood!) now in Spring 10. Before the Apple laptops, I as an individual and we as a family had a TON of non-Apple laptops… maybe 5 or 6, and the longest lifespan we ever got was 2 years. I’m not a heavy user, in terms of quality, I don’t run games, anything that takes a lot of memory, etc, but in terms of quantity, it is on pretty much all day every day.

Thanks for the links and comments!

You may want to buy two and periodically swap them entirely to make sure there’s nothing dear to you that you can’t swap out in a few minutes!

My day job is managing a compute farm with thousands of nodes, we make it very clear to the people who use these machines that any data left on them is left there at their peril, and can be removed at pretty much any time we see fit, with no notice at all! Of course, we run about two dead machines a week for one reason or another, so sometimes we don’t even get to choose when a system is rebuilt!