Re: Performance Upgrade
At a former workplace we acquired a job lot of discontinued old servers as there was still demand for spares. These were Intel processor based, but not PC architecture, and only ran one obscure and forgotten operating system. I forget the precise details, but there were two models of these servers, with memory expansion boards for one model retailing at about four times the price of the other.
We stripped these servers down to extract the memory boards, and noticed that they were identical, right down to the model number. Further examination of the recovered boards revealed an un-marked option jumper, set one way on the cheaper boards, and in the opposite way on the expensive ones.
The same vendor charged had also charged a 400% premium on SCSI drives - the hardware would only recognise drives that had been pre-formatted with a special signature. We found a fix for that - a hidden menu option on the system's diagnostic tape.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
