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by: stewart Harding

The life expectancy of a PC
Many articles have been written regarding PC life expectancy but none of them really apply to the taxi booking and dispatch industry or any other industry where PCs are left switched on 24 Hours a day so let us just look at the raw data and extrapolate what we can from it.

Both Intel and AMD specify the expected life of a home/office PC CPU at 30,000 -50,000 hours at ambient temperatures. The life expectancy can be considerably shorter if the electronics are stressed in any way. That equates to 3-5 years. Most failures will be as a result of thermal stress and therefore to ensure the full 30-50,000 hours the PCs should be well ventilated and have the fans and filters checked and serviced every 3000 hours (approx 4 months). Everytime your PC CPU is operating above its ideal operating temperature it is ageing much faster.

Based on the assumption that most home office PCs are only switched on for 3-10 hours a day this makes the life expectancy 8-15 years. It also makes the fan/filter service interval at about 3 years which is when most people are thinking about upgrading to the lateset whizzo chipset or soundcard anyway.

So nearly everyone who consumes PCs are happy as technological development leaps forward faster than the failure rate of the PC components and therefore PCs tend to be scrapped or upgraded long before the hardware needs servicing or breaks down.

If we now look at an industry where the PC is required to work 24/7 most suppliers would recommend purpose designed fileservers for such a job. Fileservers are usually rack mounted in temperature controlled dust free cabinets (ours is). It is therefore not unfair to assume that such environments and the purpose built ruggedised machines may double the life expectancy of a CPU.

So lets go back to the booking and dispatch environment where the PC are left on permanently. The environment is very poor indeed. Most offices have incredible temperature variations between winter and summer, day and night.

Coupled with this the air is full of dust, exhaust soot and human detritus. On many sites I have found CPU fans and filters totally blocked after only 9 months of use. This will cause the CPU to operate at a higher temperature and therefore decrease the life expectancy to 150000 hours.

So assuming that you actually clean the fans and filters every 4 months.

You must still accept that the temperature controlled environment of most taxi offices is less than ideal. The longest you could expect trouble free operation of your PC would be a little over 3 years. Also assuming that you would want to change your PC long before it starts to play up and potentially corrupt your data or cause financial loss to your business you should be planning it at least 6 months before.

Now lets take the worst case scenario.
You place your PC on the floor in a dusty office, you leave it on 24/7 and nobody ever cleans out the fans or filters. After approx 9 months the PC is overheating in another 6 months the CPU will be malfunctioning, so after only 12-18 months you once lovely new PCs appear to be nearly scrap!! (sound familiar).
Even cleaning out the fans at this point will not reverse the thermal ageing process. In this scenario you should be ordering replacement PCs in a little over a year.

What is the answer
Well there is no real answer but knowledge and education are probably the best weapons against premature thermal aging and extending your PC life expectancy.

Protect your PC from elevated operating temperatures.
Firstly try to make sure the room temperature (the ambient temperature) does not exceed the recommended (IRO 18-22 degrees c). Coupled with this is to choose a PC manufacturer who does not skimp on the cooling arrangements and has designed a PC with extended operating hours in mind.
Some CPU cooling fans can cost as much at 7.00 is they have ball bearings and thermal sensors. Other cheap ones have nylon bearings and only cost 90p.
You will often hear these cheaper fans making squeaks or rattles as the bearings fail. Once this happens your PC is aging much faster than normal. Avoid cheap knocked down PCs. If you have someone building PCs for you pay the extra money and have a larger than needed power supply fitted (it will run cooler). Also insist that the fans are expensive bearing fans with a 50000 hour or lifetime guarantee. Try and use machines with industrial 4inch fans and not the 1inch hobby fans fitted to most cheap PCs.

Temperature alarms
If your PC has CPU temperature warning alarms make sure these are set to the lowest recommended threshold to warn you if the cooling is failing. All Server PCs built by Diplomat have raid hard drives with built in thermal sensors, these trigger an email alert in the event of a hard drive failure or the PC has a temperature problem. This enables servicing to be proactive and not reactive.

Diplomat recommends
Diplomat recommends Dell optiplex computers. They have been designed for high usage business environments. They have 2 (yes two) large industrial 4 inch fans.
Due to the size and quality of these fans they rarely wear out or become blocked.

For more information go to www.diplomat.co.uk

Accept the life expectancy and plan ahead.
Even with perfect care and consideration you PC is not designed to last much longer than 3 years in a 24/7 environment.. You should plan your replacement schedule carefully and demote or retire mission critical PCs (such asSTN1) to less critical positions after about 2 years.
Moores law dictates that the replacement will be twice as fast or half the price so don’t see this as a burden just accept it as a running cost.

Be philosophical
If you compare the life expectancy of family car and then compare it with a family car that is being used as a taxi 24/7 it will be less than half. This also applies to PCs in the same environment.

Ok its expensive or is it?
At around £600 for 1000 days work this means your computer costs you 60p a day. It works 24/7 never takes a lunch break or pulls a sickie. Its replacement in 3 years will cost less work faster and remember more. So all in all they are not such bad little critters after all, they just don’t last forever..

Stewart Harding is the CEO of windowview Ltd. www.diplomat.co.uk

source:searchwarp.com/

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