Stagger - Unless I've misread the opening post, I seemed to detect a fair bit of irony. I don't think the comparison was meant literally. At least, not the life-threatening bit. Although to many people nowadays their PC/mobile/laptop/PDA would appear to be!
I will take you to task with the price bit. Many of the visitors to this bulletin board are going more than the full nine yards attempting to pursue an aviation career. £100 may well represent another blood-letting entry in their logbook. Sure, you are right that budget PCs and current components are readily available. To you a “ton” is obviously an amount that you can right off. But spare a moment for the Wannabees and take a gander at the cost of some of the component parts of an average PC:
Pentium IV 1.8 GHz CPU £212
Generic RIMM (512Mb) £269
nVidea 64Mb GeForce 3 £139
Asus (mid range) m/board £132
Poking around willy-nilly inside a piece of kit that you can ill afford to replace (in lieu of flying) is not good advice. So, you fry a component part of an essentially redundant piece of kit.
- When was the last time you tried to obtain a replacement part?
- Have you seen the price of EDO RAM (if you can readily find it)?
- ****ed a BIOS flash on a chip that’s soldered to a motherboard?
- Ever enquired about the cost of data recovery (and the dubious success) from a knackered HDD?
Most of the problems people ask about here can be fixed with a clean installation of the OS
Yeah maybe – if you subscribe to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut or buy a new car when the ashtrays are full.