Axel
12-03-1999, 02:22 PM
The more expensive hardware manufacturers such as HP will assemble one of their high end (Vectra) systems, send it to quality control, where it is plugged into a monitor/keyboard/mouse - etc, etc. - the OS has already been put on the hard drive - and they turn it on for, say, a day of burn in. Those that fail go back into the factory for re-work. Those that are running at the end of the day are sold as premium systems.
It's, in part, just quality control to weed out the "hidden" system failures not uncovered in individual component testing. If it can stay up for an entire day without the hard drive failing, or a chip burning out, they probably are shipping out a quality system that once worked. ( I.E. once the shipping company gets hold of it - anything's possible. )
So - when you get a new computer and you've got all of your cards and drives installed the way you think they ought to go into the system, leave it on for a day or two with nothing much running to make sure you don't have some sort of hardware failure you might not otherwise notice. - then check for heat within the case - is that hard drive making a funny noise? - is the CPU chip really hot and in need of a thermal agent between the chip and the heat sink? - are the cooling fan bearings starting to make a lot of noise after a day? - does the system still see all of it's RAM? - Does the available resources figure still show pretty much what it did when you turned the thing on?
Basically - you're weeding out bad components with factory defects - that's what a burn in period means for me.
I'm sure our associates here have a few other ideas to tack on of a much more technical nature - Guys?
It's, in part, just quality control to weed out the "hidden" system failures not uncovered in individual component testing. If it can stay up for an entire day without the hard drive failing, or a chip burning out, they probably are shipping out a quality system that once worked. ( I.E. once the shipping company gets hold of it - anything's possible. )
So - when you get a new computer and you've got all of your cards and drives installed the way you think they ought to go into the system, leave it on for a day or two with nothing much running to make sure you don't have some sort of hardware failure you might not otherwise notice. - then check for heat within the case - is that hard drive making a funny noise? - is the CPU chip really hot and in need of a thermal agent between the chip and the heat sink? - are the cooling fan bearings starting to make a lot of noise after a day? - does the system still see all of it's RAM? - Does the available resources figure still show pretty much what it did when you turned the thing on?
Basically - you're weeding out bad components with factory defects - that's what a burn in period means for me.
I'm sure our associates here have a few other ideas to tack on of a much more technical nature - Guys?