It's chatter...hardware chatter...regarding tech (non)support...in no way VFP-related, but...

I'm talking to Buffalo tech support about a LinkStation Duo 2TB NAS drive that I was having some problems with. I asked the rep about why it was taking 3 days to do a disk erase and she claimed that the unit would slow down over time due to "wear and tear on the processor". Yeah, really, she said that. I guess all the electrons rushing through the processor tear it up. I should have asked for a performance degradation prediction curve (or maybe it's linear). What can I expect? 1 GHz when new, .75 GHz after the first year, .50 GHz after the second year, and so on. Maybe I'll get to zero GHz eventually, right? (These are made-up numbers, I have no idea at the moment what the speed of the processor is.)

Can you believe this? What would you say to this woman? I told her it was simply not true and we discussed this, during which time she kept insisting, and I eventually asked to talk to someone else. She said she could put me back in the queue, which I agreed to, and then - coincidentally, I'm sure - I got disconnected.

Now I know her statement to be untrue, but I did a little research anyway and found this: "Now then, as for mechanical degradation- in the solid-state world we call it "electromigration" ie the electrons very slowly migrate to try and make the atoms neutrally charged. This can create very bad things like shorts inside the CPU that simply cannot be fixed and your CPU just wont work anymore. It takes a very long time for this to happen (it's also a factor of materials used, size of the mask used, and voltage applied) and so you usually dont have to worry about it. Your CPU wiill not slow down due to elecromigration, it will simply go caput."

Caput is something we can all probably relate to. Mainly I've had drives go caput, but solid-state parts have failed on me, too. But this is, of course, not what she was saying. She was claiming the processor would slow down over time due to wear and tear. Where do they find these people?

Russell Campbell