[jimothycheese]

I was wondering what kind of PC would be necessary for to reliably handle running a Vanquish UHPLC off of? Thermo is saying they want us to buy a ~$2000 desktop with 2 SSDs and an i7 processor, but I can't imagine this is necessary considering every other system in our lab is run on old Win7 machines. The ability to use the enterprise software to handle multiple systems would be nifty, but it isn't a necessity.

[Enthalpy]

I have no opinion about the processing power and interfaces your apparatus needs. But about physical reliability:

• PC are not reliable. They are bad junk, meant to fail after few years at home. They save cents where they should not and are badly designed.
• Servers are far less bad, because their customers care about that.
• PC, and generally electronics, exceptionally fail from wear or random component failure. They fail from fully deterministic causes acting on bad design: coffee cup, blackout, bad frame and connectors, drop, operator error.
• Cables protected mechanically, connectors secured, workplace protected mechanically. Backups.
• Uninterruptible power supply. Waterproof case.
• Ssd are more reliable than mechanical hard disks. Raid-1 or raid-5 on a server.