Question about CPUs. (Warning: A stupid one)

[Tomas]

AmigaMance wrote:
 Can a CPU (68k, PPC603) become slower by the passing of time, if it suffers from mechanical (bumps) or thermal stress?
 I'm not talking about the clock frequency, which will be always the same (i guess) but about the overall performance of that CPU.
 Well, i warned you that this is a stupid question, so be gentle. :-D

Nope, not possible.. It can however start calculating wrong if something becomes defect, which will most likely result in a unstable computer that crashes alot. I believe the cpu is the component in a pc that has the longest lifetime if used properly. Pretty much the only thing that is likely to kill your cpu, is heat, wrong voltage and overclocking it way up.

Actually i have noticed the opposite of your question. I found that a cpu clock lower when it is new, while after a few years i seem to be able to overclock it higher than when it was new.
One example was my old p1 133.. I first could only overclock it to 166mhz without stability issues. At 180mhz it would either crash at boot or soon after. Then later after running it at 166mhz for some time i could bump it up to 180mhz and after staying there for a while i could bump it up to 200mhz using the same exact components. It ran perfectly stable at 200mhz for years, even running seti@home 24/7 and would even nearly boot at 220mhz.

[Tomas]

6 years later I was called to format the hard drive and reinstall windows 98 because (unsurprisingly again) the old setup got seriously messed up. Again win98 , same driver set, 3dmark 2000.... guess what.... 762 marks!

Could be something simple as a missing or different version of the chipset drivers. There is just no way a cpu can get slower like that. The only way it could get slower, is if the speed was throttled down by bios due to overheating.

[Tomas]

Actual harddrive must be replace at least each 2 years if they are used 10h/days, after that they lost 50% of the speed output.

That also sounds like bull*it to me..
I have a old seagate 10gig from 1998, which has been running 24/7 since that time and still runs in my server today. The performance tests i did earlier this year shows that it still gives around the same performance today. Saying that it will be 50% slower after 2 years is the biggest bull i have ever heard.

It sounds to me like you have not defragged or formated the disk in ages. The windows filesystem has a tendency to get fragmented, and thus one would experience the loss of performance you are talking about. It just has zero to do with the physical hard drive.

[Tomas]

JJ wrote:
Stop........De-fraging a hard-drive is pointless.  It will take hours and hours, and you will not notice the real world difference (apart from the old its supposed to be faster so it is effect).  you will never gain back the time lost in de-fraging in a performance gain.  And guess what as soon as you have de-fragged the drive it gets fragmented again.  

I hope you are joking  :-o
Claiming something like this, makes you look very clueless..
If you use your pc alot for years without defragging, then you will for sure notice a noticeable increase in performance after defragging a windows box. Defragging can be done at anytime, even while you sleep. Having a very fragmented filesystem is not good for your disk either, as it will have to work so much harder when data is fragmented all over the disk.

[Tomas]

no I am not clueless, if you look at the time it takes to defrag a large harddrive (and I am not talking about if you are sleeping etc) just about the actual time. You will NEVER get that time back in speed increase.

And how often would you suggest defragging your HDD. Because very very quickly after a defrag you will get to the same stage again.

That part is true, but i doubt most people sit on their pc for 24/7. One can make the pc do it lets say once a month or so at night time or at other times you dont use the pc. Less often if you dont use the hard drive so hard that it is fragmented. I would not defrag if it was lets say less than 10% fragmented. It all depends on how you use your pc.

But anyways.. Sorry for sounding so harsh in my first reply. I read it as if you suggested that defragging would not do a thing even if you do it on a very fragmented system.

[Tomas]

JJ wrote:
Ok then prehaps I should have said in some cases de-fragging your harddrives is not always nessecary  :-D

Then we agree..  :-)