> > and/or a cooler would somehow come loose.
>
> The issue here isn't the dead cpu and dead motherboard, but the resulting
> fire burning down the entire building :-)

sounds like joke but it is NOT A JOKE. i've seen melted and burned socket
:)

> > But to be honest, without
> > hotswap CPU and memory (or even mainboard) real redundancy is not
> > possible. My customers do not take hotswap PCI solutions for the
> > price such systems are at.
>
> Yes: I played with PCI hot-swap (writing some of the PCI driver support).
> It was obvious we could demonstate removing a working board and replacing
> it with a different one.  Dunno which faults that gave tolerence to!
> More likely is that the added complexity would give additional failures...
> >
>
> Yes many x86 systems are completely unbalanced - Joe public seems to assume
> that more MHz of cpu makes a better system.  Would anyone in there right
> mind buy the P4 2GHz system that 'Tiny' have been advertising on UK TV.
> It probably runs slower that my IPX - ok maybe not that slow..

for sure it runs faster. but not much faster than PIII/733 or so.