Comment Industrial experience (Score 1) 383
I've seen several interesting solutions over the years.
1) In an open area on a mine site, the PC was built into one of those aluminium travel cases with just the essential leads passing through cable glands in the side of the case. It was carried off-site when anything needed to be done to it. It even survived a solid bump from one of those huge trucks.
2) An ancient PC at a cement mixing plant lasted longer than any of its faster, newer competitors. Despite having its internals clogged with dust its slower, cooler processor did not falter when the fans stopped. (well,... OK. It sometimes went a bit stoopid in the hot weather.) The roll up keyboard has lasted 3 years now and survives shaking, washing, and plenty of abuse. The 'real' keyboards would be lucky to last 3 months. The optical mouse makes tracks in the dust and has never missed a beat.
3) I have a single board PC in an aluminium case the size of a large novel in the garage. The CPU is pressed up against the case and uses it as a big heat sink. It's a 266Mhz machine runing Debian. (I have used Win98 previously) I move everything in and out of it through the network and so it has no CD/Floppy. I plug in a USB mouse and keyboard into it when I need to. It's not a gaming machine, but it saves me having to trudge into the house when I need to look stuff up. It doesn't use much power so I rarely turn it off. It cost me $100 through eBay.
4) Expandable PCs have been used at a few places where the company had a stock of the same PC. Use the network to move the data off the machine. Image a new one when the old one gets too hard to fix.
1) In an open area on a mine site, the PC was built into one of those aluminium travel cases with just the essential leads passing through cable glands in the side of the case. It was carried off-site when anything needed to be done to it. It even survived a solid bump from one of those huge trucks.
2) An ancient PC at a cement mixing plant lasted longer than any of its faster, newer competitors. Despite having its internals clogged with dust its slower, cooler processor did not falter when the fans stopped. (well,... OK. It sometimes went a bit stoopid in the hot weather.) The roll up keyboard has lasted 3 years now and survives shaking, washing, and plenty of abuse. The 'real' keyboards would be lucky to last 3 months. The optical mouse makes tracks in the dust and has never missed a beat.
3) I have a single board PC in an aluminium case the size of a large novel in the garage. The CPU is pressed up against the case and uses it as a big heat sink. It's a 266Mhz machine runing Debian. (I have used Win98 previously) I move everything in and out of it through the network and so it has no CD/Floppy. I plug in a USB mouse and keyboard into it when I need to. It's not a gaming machine, but it saves me having to trudge into the house when I need to look stuff up. It doesn't use much power so I rarely turn it off. It cost me $100 through eBay.
4) Expandable PCs have been used at a few places where the company had a stock of the same PC. Use the network to move the data off the machine. Image a new one when the old one gets too hard to fix.
