The shortage is also in the older plants. In fact, it's the 130nm, 180nm and similar nodes, that are currently in use for mixed signal chips where the bulk of automotive chip are made. All "older digital" nodes eventually become analog / mixed signal nodes, and those old fabs do run a full capacity today. That will not change any time soon, as chip demand only grows. In other words, that investment is not easily lost. And it's not just 5nm (or 3nm, if you want the latest and smallest). We also need more RF power nodes (which is mainly bipolar, not MOS), and we need fabs for mixed signal chips (higher voltage). We do have some capacity already today, but it's not nearly enough. It's a true national security issue, since we cannot outsource for example all military chip manufacturing, as that requires us to hand over the blueprints to that outside manufacturer. I hope it happens, that's more critical than fixing the potholes in our street.

Apple and Microsoft make us believe that the GUI defines the OS, oh well... I think the OS will become irrelevant. Why do so many computers still run an old system like XP? Because there's simply not enough need for "yet another great OS". It's the new hardware and slowly the newer software that drives the move to windows 7, while the recession slowed down investment in new hardware. But the time that you had all your information stored on a PC and maybe some backup drive, is becoming history. We don't want have our data and it's associated applications tight to one location. We want have it on the road, at home, everywhere. Which is why I think the "cloud computing" trend is real, and that means that the OS for many applications will become totally irrelevant.

Unfortunately most home use PSU's have no self test build in, so you need to verify it yourself. Are the voltages in range? also under the heavy load? Almost all other units in our PC do have a POST (power on self test). So if a PC boots fine, what remains are mainly intermittent failures, which are a lot harder to uncover.

Apart from hard drive failures, the three most common types of failures you'll find on a mother board are:

1) faulty supply capacitors. These cause supply noise, or even worse, make the supply on the board itself unstable. The small ceramic caps on a board rarely fail, but the bigger elcos often do. The result can be that digital communication on the communication busses fails, or parts become unstable.Not so easy to diagnose by software. What is a clear sign, when more then one part on your board seems to fail. With a scope you can check for supply noise. Some bad elco series were easy to see, their packages were ballooning and they were leaking some brown stuff.

2) intermittent connections. This happens more often then you would guess, but certainly in modern PC's where big (memory) chips are soldered down on ball grid arrays, failing connection do occur. To diagnose it, you could try tapping on the board with the handle of a screwdriver, while your PC is running some heavy program. But that does not reveal all bad connection of the ball grid arrays. More effective is "cold spray", cooling the suspected parts down will widen the gaps of bad connections.

3) Faulty chips. I think this is actually rare, chips die pretty hard (even memory), most parts suffer from failing connections. But if a chip is on the edge of failing, that is revealed by heating them up. Give them a stress test using a heavy load, place your PC in a warm place, direct sunlight and run a stress test. This is probably best captured by software tools.

I'm very surprised about all negative comments. Yes, up to 4.1 a lot of things didn't work, were unstable. Currently I use the 4.2 RC2 release (on Gentoo), and to be honest, it just works really nice. Ok, in preferences I replaced conquerer for FF3 (those build in browser are horrible). But the configuration menu is easy and good (seems a copy of apple's) , dolphin also seems a copy from Apple's and is perfect if you ask me. I haven't seen any crashes with this latest release so far. I like how it looks and feels. At work we have gnome, which works fine too, but starts looking out dated, like XP. I think from 4.2 and higher it will be an attractive and useful desktop, with a lot of potential.

That's how we use them. Our cad software runs on Linux, so we buy workstation that we plug into our network, and we're ready to play. All we need to do is set the network setting, NIS, and a few security setting and we're ready. Just like the old days when we had Solaris work stations.