I just wanted to sound off about the quality of the products we are foisted with today. I always spend top dollar on the best quality equipment for my hobby, yet sadly this does not seem reflected in its reliability. The failure this morning of my OCZ vertex 60GB SSD which housed the operating system of my number 2 PC is just the latest in a string of hardware failures over the last 2 years, including 2 velociraptor hard drives, 2 Nvidia high end video cards and a tagan 1100 watt power supply. All of this stuff was class leading top of the range supposedly best quality.meantime, my cheap as chips $200 PC's at work that i brought 4 years ago soldier on with no problems.I think we are having our chains yanked here, all this stuff is made in China to the lowest quality standards they can get away with. Most of these items werre replaced under RWA,., but thats not the point when all that data and all the time needed to sort it out is taken into play. When are we going to start getting value for money in terms of product quality and reliability?Very p***ed off Mark, who now has to look forward to spending the next 3 or 4 evenings reinstalling windows and setting up my PC again........

I hear and feel your pain. I have RMAed two EVGA graphics cards and just bought a GTX 480 SC. What really kills me is that for the last RMA I had to wait two months. I purchased the 480 so it was not that big of a deal. I can not imagine going without FSX for two months. I was almost forced to buy an ATI card. :( :(

Pure luck of the draw. I have 3 relatively high-end systems which I have built over the last 1-2 years and have experienced only a single hardware failure (XFX GTX 285) in any of them over that time. The card that failed was promptly replaced with the same model, and has been running strong for over a year since.

I just wanted to sound off about the quality of the products we are foisted with today. I always spend top dollar on the best quality equipment for my hobby, yet sadly this does not seem reflected in its reliability. The failure this morning of my OCZ vertex 60GB SSD which housed the operating system of my number 2 PC is just the latest in a string of hardware failures over the last 2 years, including 2 velociraptor hard drives, 2 Nvidia high end video cards and a tagan 1100 watt power supply. All of this stuff was class leading top of the range supposedly best quality.meantime, my cheap as chips $200 PC's at work that i brought 4 years ago soldier on with no problems.I think we are having our chains yanked here, all this stuff is made in China to the lowest quality standards they can get away with. Most of these items werre replaced under RWA,., but thats not the point when all that data and all the time needed to sort it out is taken into play. When are we going to start getting value for money in terms of product quality and reliability?Very p***ed off Mark, who now has to look forward to spending the next 3 or 4 evenings reinstalling windows and setting up my PC again........

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I'm wondering if part of the problems could be the environment that the system is operating under? For example, where on the globe are you, equator, desert, area of high humidity, dampness of using the system in a basement/rec-room? Why do some have no problems, and others are plagued with them? I partly suspect it is where the user is living on the planet..... Could be something as simple as this.

Another thing that helps - using a UPS w/AVR. I do on all my systems.

Another thing that helps - using a UPS w/AVR. I do on all my systems.

And ...1) buy 2 low cost removable SATA hdd drawer/tray kits2) Install 1 tray in your tower3) buy and install 2 lower priced hdds (size them to suit your needs) into each of the drawers4) use the Win7 backup image utility to take a snapshot your of the entire installation including the 2nd drive for fsx (if configured as such)5) rotate the 2 hdds periodically and save a system image regularly (I do so weekly for example of right after a major tweaking session)6) keep one drawer off-site, the other in a safe place7) make a Win7 recovery/repair diskFollowing this method, you will...1) never have to reload your system from zero again (unless you like doing so once in a while)2) have a very quick recovery path to the latest installed state3) saving a system image is fast because the hdd is local4) offsite and backup hdd redundency5) you can save images for intermediate installation stages. For example a fresh clean FSX install6) find better use for your time the playing IT dude.The days of installing/reloading software for hours/days are thankfully gone.

I agree - most technology products today are not made to the same standards 10 years ago...Our PS3 died about 7 months after purchase... something wrong with the blue ray laser.. luckily it was under warranty but if it breaks again we won't be so lucky this time around.My wife's old Dell (circa 2002) is still running...