Whoops, noticed they changed it. My bad. Last one I got was a tad larger form factor and had 2 x 1.5s in there.

There's 2 x 1.5TB drives in that.

In my 8+ years as the lone sysAdmin at a college, this is what I've seen (highest to lowest in terms of fail rate) for both student and facilities machines.

WinPC:
Hard Drive
Optical (on combo's, DVD laser always goes out first)
PSU
RAM - 5 fails ever, 4 of 5 being ECC RAM in workstations.
Mobo - 2
CPU - only one ever, over about 150 machines deployed

MAC:
Hard Drive
Optical (#1 fail for lappy's however)
Mobo (quite high for lappy's)
PSU - especially first gen G5's.
RAM

I always tell the kids...any desktop is 4-7 years average life for the HD. Laptops are almost always 2-3 yrs tops. Much less if they torrent on their lappy drives. I really like macs, but the laptops always cook the internal HD's.

Don't know about yours, but mine's been the best Lappy I've ever owned. centrino 1.8, dedicated radeon x1300, 2 gigs of ram and a 1920x1200 screen. On it's third round of batteries, and had to replace the FL inverter and HD at about the third year, but it'll be 6 this winter, and is still a tank. BTI Replacement batteries are great in the capacity dept as replacements btw, but 3 of the 4 I have gotten have prematurely failed, in odd ways (like sudden loss of power, not voltage-ing down, just drop to nothing, as if a cell went into protection on its own.

Not necessarily. The boxes are 24/7 vampires unless they're breakered every night at a strip or wall. My gym had to get a box from comcast last week for EVERY cardio machine that had an integrated TV. This meant 35 boxes. Each one runs warm, and also requires a remote control (no controls on the box). So in addition to 10-20 watts per box times 35, there's also 2X AA's times 35 once a year or so. If you're conservative with the numbers, that's 8.4 KWh a day of power draw that didn't exist before, regardless of a TV being on or not.

Why not just put a small piece of tape right over the antenna seam? That would hinder the skin conductivity, right?

>>>CFLs? Or just standard fluorescent tubes? The halls in Penn State's dorms were all ~3 feet long tube-lights, not CFLs

Our dorms were almost entirely 65W incan floods. Crazy, right?

Every double and quad also has a 6.5 GPM (measured) YMCA style showerhead too, with electric waterheaters. Now that's ridiculous. Replaced one floor of 10 doubles with 2.2 GPM showerheads, $500-$650 lower powerbills PER MONTH for the floor (20 residents), depending on the inlet water temperature, which varies with the seasons. Showerheads paid for themselves in 3 weeks.

It really depends on the brand of the bulb. I've had a few Philips that were bought in the 90's, used every night dusk till dawn outside, and they lasted 10+ years. In our school dorms, I replaced a few spots in the common area with a few of the older looped (not squared-off) Ikea 11W'ers. Light's are on 24/7/365. 6 of the 8 are at 2+ years now, that's almost 20,000 hours, on -already used- bulbs.

We replaced all the hall lights in the dorms with 13 watt and 20 watt CFL's, for a total of about 45 bulbs. All GE brand....4 have failed after 18 months of 24/7/365. The rest are still going strong. That's still way above their spec of 8,000hrs IIRC.

I've used a few FEIT and Lights Across America. One LAA had a "bad failure", where the ballast base actually started smoking. The FEIT's had a pretty wide range of color temp, for being the same model.

For organizations such as ourselves where we have areas that need to be lit 24/7/365, the savings are very easily calculated. In the 24/7 sockets, with myself and a student worker volunteering our time to purchase and install the bulbs, the cost of the bulb payed for itself in electric savings (city industrial rate, $0.141/kwh) in less than 5 weeks, over the 65W incan floods they replaced. Crazy.