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nearby lightning skrike kills neighbours computers (and mine)

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Carol Haynes:
Sorry to say it but it just wouldn't be worth a business building a machine for £50. It doesn't cover labour costs, national insurance, stock depreciation etc. and you also have to factor in providing warranty service, facilities for building (unless it is a small one person business), insurance etc..

I certainly couldn't/wouldn't build a computer for the price for a client.

If you look at off the shelf computers from the big boys I'd guess that over 75% of the cost is split in profits for the manufacturer and retailer (given the huge scale of bulk discounts they must get).

nudone:
True, I can't complain that they want to make money. I just wish I'd not been so eager to buy a new machine and then I'd have spent a bit of time calculating what it would cost me. Maybe I'd still have gone for the option of them building it regardless of the cost - because I would have considered it worth it to avoid all the hassle myself.

Oh well, it's done now.

mouser:
spending time worrying about wasting money is often much worse an affliction that wasting a little money.  if you had built it yourself you'd just as likely have a whole host of different problems.

just put it out of your mind, it sounds like you did well in the end -- just enjoy your new super pc  :up:

JavaJones:
Just for the sake of info, from everything I can find (and this was not something I knew so I was curious enough to look around a bit), SATA 3, AKA 6GB/s SATA, did *not* change the cabling at all. That being said, there *may* be differences in cable quality and *shielding* and due to the higher data rate SATA 3 is going to have lower tolerance for mediocre cables.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/SATA-III-cable-C300-UD7/m-p/11960#M4271
http://www.jdhodges.com/2011/06/performance-difference-sata-ii-3gbs-sata-iii-6gbps-cables-solved/

With that in mind, unless the cable you had problems with is a different brand from your others that work (not the 6GB/s one you have now, but any others you might be using), or otherwise seems like it may simply be a "low quality cable", I would tend to suspect it may actually be flaky/bad. Something to think about. The cables are cheap, may be best just throwing that one out...

- Oshyan

nudone:
Right. Can't say I'm too surprised that they are the same (unless there is a genuine improvement with shielding and quality). I didn't want to research if there was a difference or not as I didn't want to find out they were identical and then blow my "wrong cable" theory out of the water. Knowing that there isn't a difference also explains why the store didn't bother to use the special cable.

Not sure what to do or say, really. The machine appears fine now and I really don't know which is the original "bad" cable as I've got four identical old style sata cables in there now (plus the "special" 6Gb/s cable) that all came with the ASUS motherboard.

I guess first sign I see of something not working correctly I should just buy four new cables to replace the ones I have, that's the only way I'll really know I've removed the possible dodgy cable.

Or, I just order four new cables right now and avoid the trouble of something going wrong. One annoying problem is that I don't know if it's the socket on the motherboard that's at fault (or even something else).

Having said all that - there IS a potential difference because of the quality of the cable. Perhaps there genuinely is a good reason for this and that is simply why the solid state drive now works.

I'm beginning to really hate computers. I think I'll just go and bury my head in the sand until the machine explodes in a spectacular fashion.

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