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It could be practical if the smartcart reader came with your motherboard, like it does with the Soyo Dragon+. I have this motherboard, and it includes Windows software for smartcard reader access. You almost fooled me into believing MUSCLE was exactly what I was looking for to revive my six-month-unused SCR slot, but it's nothing to be excited about. For they only aim to benefit one specific Unix distribution, this was definitely done just so they could have a cute acronym.

Frequently when I check brick and mortar companies (we aren't even talking about Office Depot here, they're outrageously priced), the prices, (particularly including tax) aren't as good as I can get from a reputable online retailer (sometimes even with 2nd day air). A few sources I trust, one of which is also a catalog retailer:

Techstore - Reliable, not necesarily a bargain. Decent support, fast delivery (four warehouses in the US, widly separated for best delivery time). They don't trans-ship, but their RMA is reasonable.

PC COnnection - Reliable, good prices, decent delivery times, EXCELLENT RMA. I had a Linksys router go bad for no apparent reason and they trans-shipped one to me along with reimbursement for sending the old one back. They also do catalog.

Bunta - Decent prices, ok delivery time. Haven't had to send anything back yet.

Multiwave Direct - Speedy delivery, good prices, reliable service. If I can find it on Multiwave, I would buy from them first. Products ordered UPS ground from Multiwave tend to show up within 2-3 business days.

OK...caveat: if you want it right now you might as well find a brick and mortar. If you can wait a few days or a week, I find online to truly be cheaper.

YMMV

I didn't find them as quiet as other reviewers have - the fan noise is definitely noticeable, but not terribly loud. Like Tom's Hardware, I really wished they'd gone with a GeForce2-based integrated video card solution. You could slap in a PCI version if you want to sacrifice your single slot and disable the integrated video. DVI-out instead of VGA would have been even sweeter, so I could mate this with an LCD monitor for a sweet little LAN party box that I can carry in one load (without breaking my back). But it's hard to complain with VGA out and front-mounted USB/mike/audio. It also looks pretty cool and is surprisingly light.

I didn't have an opportunity to snag one for Linux or FreeBSD, so I don't know how well my favorite *nix distros run on them, but I can't wait to find out. I'm fully satisfied with them in our office environment - you can put a couple of them under your desk without splitting open your knee on the case. I highly recommend them.

Take a look at this barebones toaster sized machine for $250 available for purchase from here.

It comes with mobo, and power supply, on board ether, s3 savage4 agp (even tv out), audio (only 2 channel), usb, firewire, plus one pci slot. I personally put a wintv card in it so I can use it as a tv, and a dvd drive to play dvd, but you could easily put in a dolby 5.1 card instead of the wintv card.

I put a 1 ghz celery in it, but as it stands it's rather noisy, casefan + cpu fan + psu fan + hd. But if you get a via c3 it should be able to run without a cpu fan.

It also should be possible to also hack out the small, noisy case fan that it has now and put in larger, and quieter case fan. Dremmel tool is probably required for this one, or a very nimble hand with tin snips. :)

Another thing you might to do quiet it up a bit is search for silent drives, I think seagate either makes or is going to make a quiet ide drive. There's also sleaves you can get for ide drives to quiet them, but that might require your only 5.25 bay, which means you'd then need a usb or firewire dvd drive.

Mine's more of a do it yourselfer but it has pretty much standard hardware, and should have enough horsepower to do pretty much anything that you'd want to do with it, sans FPS games, because of the slow 3d video. 2d is fine though.

sv24=$250 via c3~$70? hd=$100-150, dvd drive=$60? You pretty much have a machine after that, and any thing else is optional.

For a slick looking, small case try this one. $250 for a aluminim toaster sized case with mobo/power supply/fan. All it needs is ram, cpu, hd and dvd drive. On board everything, usb, firewire, s4 savage video (not the best for fps games, but it'll do for everything else), ethernet, sound, ide. I just ordered one today, I just pray they actually have them in stock. :)

It's a little more, but probably a lot more attractive. I plan on putting a tv tuner card and use it for a dvd player/tv/mp3/ogg/mame/etc player for my bedroom. Running linux of course. :)

Thinking about putting a VIA C3 (passivly cooled x86 chip, mmm quiet) in it, but I can't find the 800/866 models for sale anywhere.

Multiwave sells custom laptops here. You can even get one without an OS so you can install Linux on it and you don't have to pay for Windows!

I buy all my computer stuff from mwave. They're very reliable.

Did you make it past the first page of the review? The second, and last, page has them for sale here.

Hmm, have you looked at the price of SCSI RAID cards lately? Certainly not out of the bugdet, you can pick up an Adaptec single channel RAID card for $333.95 at mwave.com. This card supports raid 0, 1, 0/1, and 5.

Having redundant disks is important enough to me to spend the ~$350 + extra disk that I would consider it on any machine where I consider uptime to be important.

Well, take a look at Multiwave's 802.11b NICs. The cheapest PCMCIA card there is only $101.00. Sure, it's not an access point, but the NICs are in range of a large hard drive's price.

I'm sorry, but if you spent $650 on a GeForce3 two weeks ago, you are truly a jackass. They haven't cost that much since they were first released. Mwave has Guillemot's offering listed as being $352 now, so you need to either do us all a favor and cut the drama or learn how to shop around.

Just assemble and ship the product. If you don't know how to use it, don't buy it from us. A side benefit of this idea would be that "hard-core" computer geeks can stop wandering from site to site to build their computers. Since there's little over-head to cover, prices will stay cheap.

I'm skeptical that they could do anything, that, for example, mwave can't. It's a rare piece of (new) hardware that I don't buy from them. You can pay a little extra to get a full box assembled before they ship, but it's better to get it as is, IMHO. And you can, of course, order anything else you might want - full flexibility. Split your computer purchase over 2 orders (which is, in fact, what I'm doing right now - the video card, DVD-ROM, and sound card won't be ordered until next month). Get stuff that Dell would never sell you: you want 3 PCI Voodoo 5 5500s in your new box? - go for it [actually I think their stock of Voodoo5s ran out a while back, but you get the idea]. And get it damn cheap, at least compared to Dell, et. al.

Their policies are pretty much what you describe; their return procedures are fine [if it's broken, they'll replace it], they sell quality stuff, and there is no real support. But if you have questions, they will answer them, to the best of their ablities, in a quick and courteous manner. And they ship fast (like, same day, in most cases - next day, if you want them to assemble stuff for you).

Your hypothetical company could offer more products, etc, but that's about the only benefit I would see to it. And on the down side: QA problems [is there a warranty? If so, how do your make sure that your wide selection of stuff can't be mixed together to form something that doesn't work due to conflicts.], slower shipments than parts places (you have to built each one by hand, because there are a big selection of different parts - you can't pre-build common selections very well), and a new start-up is going to have a hard time getting business of that sort, because 90% of the people I know who are building a PC order everything from mwave.

Currently sitting in a room with 9 mwave machines...

See my homepage, where I detail the parts I used for my 1.4GHz Athlon machine for work. It's the third Athlon system I've built, preceeded by numerous 386/486/Pentium/PPro/K6 systems.

Antec has a new 350W p/s that makes a good, inexpensive choice for a single-CPU system, and they sell a nice midtower case that comes with it. I say "inexpensive" relative to the PC Power & Cooling gear I usually get.

Toy stores: MWave.com for selection, Newegg.com for price. I've bought a lot of stuff from MWave, haven't tried Newegg yet but will next chance I get, they're supposed to be good. EMS Computing has great prices on Antec stuff, I bought from them once, but their site is s-l-o-w.

It could really use a RAM upgrade, but old FPU SIMMs are really expensive

I know it can be a pain in the ass to just replace the MB but for just a few more dollars it becomes much more cost effective to do a more comprehensive upgrade.

Here's what the numbers look like from my favorite online PC vendor (Multiwave)

128M RAM (32MB SIMMS) = $128

Complete barebones system including the following:

Enlight Case - $70
256MB RAM - $27
AMD Duron 750 - $45
Biostar M7VKS - $62

Total: $206 + Shipping

I assumed your old case was AT and needed to be replaced as well. The Biostar motherboard is not the greatest but its cheap and includes crappy integrated video. If you can do without the case, you can do the whole upgrade for an extra $8

> But Win2K screamed on those duals,

NT4 was DEFINATELY much more snappy on a dual system. Win2K still seems a little sluggish, BUT ONLY when opening a new window, it seems fine otherwise. I think it's the ram, or lack of it. Both, at work (single cpu) and at home (dual cpu's) only have 128 megs of RAM. I'm thinking another 128 megs would help. (Here I thought NT was a memory pig, then along comes Diablo 2 ;-)

> How much would the P3-800s run for nowadays anyway?
Checking www.mwave.com, the P3s-800 are ~ $320. I have bought stuff from there before and enjoy the quality of service, even though they aren't _the_ cheapest, they do have good prices.

> In fact I'm planning on playing around with a 1394 hard drive adapter one of these days.
Isn't 1394 firewire ?

I probably should upgrade my outdated scsi-2 up to scsi-160. I need a screaming fast drive for reading / writing. Any recommendations I should look into? (I have a budget max of $500 for a new hard drive plus controller.)

Cheers

I never said I wanted "the best" - I know how much prices vary, when it comes to this stuff. (4 to 5 orders of magnitude.) Pointing out my desire to use a DCR-TRV 103 was, as you pointed out, a very consice way for me to say exactly what level of product I would be happy with - I think for the money ($649), it can't be beat.

You're right - I'm obviously not high-end. However, I will use whatever system I buy, and I did two days of research before I posted my question. I wan't satisfied with the information I found (and I had run dry on my sources), so I played my Nerd Trump Card - I Asked Slashdot. Unfortunately, my strong Intel bias limited me from finding the G4 information that I needed, making me look like an idiot to people like you. If you unintentionally overlook all the Mac DV editing options, the $499 Canopus Raptor with the full Adobe Premiere 5.1 (together) starts to seem pretty good. After looking at the Raptor Requirements, the eMonster 550R looked like more than enough machine (once you upgrade to about 256M of Ram, and toss in a second hard-drive at about 30G.) Granted, I prefer home-brewed solutions, but the couple eMachines we have at work stack up fairly well, for the price we paid for them. It's also a lot easier to describe a home-brew machine by pointing to the closest consumer-level product...

I don't want to shoot the next Star Wars; I was hoping I could make something that looked 1/10th as cool as El Mariachi. (If you don't know about El Mariachi, then it's hard to imagine you know anything about amateur film-making.) I'd like to make something maybe 5-10 minutes long, for my first attempt. Think "Bedhead", but in color. I believe this is a realistic goal, since Robert Rodriguez says he thinks that digital video is the wave of the future - that young film-makers are going to swamp the biz with fairly high-quality films for dirt cheap. I don't think he'd say that unless he'd researched it some, and he's got far better connections and a lot more money than I do.

Anyways, thanks for the unwarranted criticism - gave me something to stew over.

P.S. If most of the $7000 spent on El Mariachi was on buying and developing film, and if I spend $7000 on digital equipment, do you think I'll be able to come close to its quality? (An Arriflex 16S Camera compared to a Sony DCR-TRV 103?)

DOn't know where you are located, but here in the Los Angeles area, you can pick up MS Naturals for about $19 OEM. Check here: http://www.mwave.com/

I can vouch for them too.
--
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.

Sorry, bad link
Good Link: mwave

Suppositivly mwave is going to start selling a athlon bundle of the processor a motherboard, and fan for 700 for a 550 and 900 for 600 MHZ chip. Starting August 25. Its under catalog/motherboard bundles. Search by processor.
I've ordered a few things from mwave and found them to be fairly on the up and up, though I warn that they can be a bitch if you have to return an idem. (or yea and beware of the mwave brand ram:)