Is All Hardware the Same Quality?

One of the things that we always have a hard time conveying to our clients is the difference between cheap hardware you purchase at Best Buy or Wal-Mart and the good business-class hardware from Dell, HP, or Fujitsu. Here is how Fujitsu explained it to us: Hardware usually starts out the same, but it’s manufactured on a bell curve. Most of the hardware is somewhere in the middle on the quality meter, while some is on the lower end and some is on the upper end. The cheap hardware might technically have the same specifications, but maybe it was supposed to be a faster processor and didn’t quite make it, or for some other reason it doesn’t meet the qualifications of the better hardware. Depending on what the requirements are, the cheaper hardware might be ok. But for a small business that uses a PC all day every day and really depends on it, you should consider a decent business-class machine. Cheap hardware that will most definitely fail before something better would. This is the part that is difficult to convince business-owners of. Yes – I can confidently say that in our experience, cheap hardware, especially laptops, aren’t built the same as the better hardware. Below is a picture of a video card. We had a server that hosted email for a small business. It would hang every now and again. We finally checked the capacitors and sure enough, they were blown. These capacitors are supposed to be nice clean flat tops, but they swelled, domed, and this case even split open. On a Saturday afternoon I removed the video card and booted the server without a problem. We replaced the video card on Monday. A lot of the cheaper retail laptops comes with AMD processors. None of us at RUN Networks have been a fan of AMD processors. Our colleague Jeff Hiller sent us a video that gives a bit of justification. It’s an older video, but shows a comparison of Intel and AMD processor under stress. Intel slows at best and freezes at worst. AMD hangs and best, but almost LIGHTS ON FIRE at worst. Now most small businesses won’t remove the heat sink, but in a case where your fan slows because of dust and isn’t cooling the processor as it was intended you would end up with a similar situation. Below is that youtube video created by tomshardware.com http://youtu.be/XgOmMAasqto For any small business, we always recommend business-class hardware. Dell and HP both have retail and business-class. Fujitsu has only business-class. Feel free to contact RUN Networks for any questions on hardware purchase, or to purchase directly through RUN Networks. Brandon Gordon RUN Networks www.runnetworkrun.com