{"id":279,"date":"2007-06-14T18:55:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-14T16:55:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-06-14T18:55:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-14T16:55:00","slug":"hp-push-pcs-to-the-limit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/hardware\/279-hp-push-pcs-to-the-limit.html","title":{"rendered":"HP push PCs to the limit"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a sprawling industrial campus in this California central valley town near Sacramento, teams of HP engineers stress new computing equipment beyond limits conceivable in everyday life.<\/font><\/p>\n

HP likes to call the punishments inflicted on its computer motherboards and monitors “the shake and bake,” and no product passes muster until it meets rigorous international standards.<\/font><\/p>\n

"Inside these chambers we can make it the climate of anywhere in the world,” HP senior quality engineer Greg Knutson told AFP in an inner sanctum of HP’s lab in Roseville.<\/font><\/p>\n

“Step inside this box and you’re in the Arctic,” he said, gesturing toward a walk in freezer-sized room where snow appeared to be falling.<\/font><\/p>\n

Knutson’s job is to give HP products a thorough beating.<\/font><\/p>\n

“Basically I get to put these pieces of technology through their whole possible life cycle in five minutes,” Knutson said.<\/font><\/p>\n

He drops, heats, cools, soaks, shocks, expands and contracts each piece of equipment sentenced to his lab before being freed into the market.<\/font><\/p>\n

“Our mission is to make these products as bulletproof as possible when it gets to the customer,” Knutson said. “We don’t want things coming back to us.” From “shake tables” that precisely replicate the wave form of the Kobe earthquake that struck Japan in 1995 to contraptions that simulate a drop from the back of a truck on a US highway, Knutson tortures technology with glee.<\/font><\/p>\n

In his role as HP’s grand inquisitor, Knutson has taped vents closed to overheat computers and stabbed internal fans with screwdrivers.<\/font><\/p>\n

“We’ll put a whole rack of servers into a 40 degree below zero (Fahrenheit, -40 C.) deep-freeze for three days, and then within five minutes, we’ve got to have it up and running,” said Knutson.<\/font><\/p>\n

He says their test results are accepted worldwide.<\/font><\/p>\n

All the equipment sent to his “dynamics and climatics labs” must be put through the most extreme conditions to expose weaknesses or flaws.<\/font><\/p>\n

The team also is charged with mitigating radiated emissions, testing products for renegade disruptive sonic waves. In a soundproof room the size a squash court, products are scanned by three antennae to regulate their potential sound wave interference.<\/font><\/p>\n

“It’s like when you used to turn on your vacuum cleaner and your television screen would get all those lines,” said HP engineer Ken Hall. “That is basically the same thing we test for.”<\/font><\/p>\n

In an electrostatic discharge lab, David Bernal uses a handheld generator gun for surge testing, blasting 20,000 volts into a rack of computer equipment decorated with smiley face stickers.<\/font><\/p>\n

“Sometimes we use these guns on each other,” said Bernal. “But that’s only an accident.” <\/font><\/p>\n

Comments<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They get electrocuted, stuck into freezing rooms, baked in desert-like heat, and thrown off trucks \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and that is only some of the torture that computer giant Hewlett Packard puts its products through to test their limits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}