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I have been telling my staff for probably 15 or so years that likeliest cause of PC failure is (in the following order):

- Power supply - Hard Drive

Ranking near these are sleeve bearing fans with ball bearing fans a close second--for CPU and case cooling.

In rough order, I would say that the following is my estimation of other common component failure sources:

- Removable Drives (floppy, optical, etc.) - Video Card (if separate) - Motherboard - RAM - CPU

These are for our corporate PCs which have been Compaq, Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo and a few other brands.

For our brand name and whitebox server hardware, it's pretty much the same... if something is going to fail, it's going to be a power supply or a hard drive. In fact, I don't ever remember a single server motherboard, RAID controller, RAM stick, CPU or other component ever going bad in a server.

I wonder why they would leave out statistics relating to power supplies when they are, in my experience, the component with the greatest failure rate.



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