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Domain: netaffilia.com
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Comments · 9
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Re:Damn I just bought one!
Not too shabby.
Let's see what it would cost for me to build a system like that and throw on Linux instead:
Retail X2 3800+ CPU & ECS GeForce6100SM-M motherboard (onboard GF6100): $90.
2 GB Kingston PC5300 DDR2 RAM (after $40 MIR): $100.
Maxtor 160 GB Serial ATA/300 hard drive: $40.
Geforce 7600 GT video card with 256 MB RAM: $110.
Samsung 18X DVD-RW: $30.
Apevia X-QPack-NW-AL MicroATX case with 420W power supply (after shipping & $10 MIR): $86.
Total: $556 plus tax, $607 total after $50 MIRs.
I guess the extra $93 is the Microsoft tax. Of course the system I describe comes with twice as much RAM and good quality onboard graphics for those wanting Xinerama Beryl dual-monitor goodness, plus a slick little case, probably much smaller and handier than what you ended up with. Since I'm not a gamer I'd save a little money and stick with the onboard graphics or maybe add a Geforce 6100 for $40 instead if I wanted dual monitors. -
Re:Damn I just bought one!
Not too shabby.
Let's see what it would cost for me to build a system like that and throw on Linux instead:
Retail X2 3800+ CPU & ECS GeForce6100SM-M motherboard (onboard GF6100): $90.
2 GB Kingston PC5300 DDR2 RAM (after $40 MIR): $100.
Maxtor 160 GB Serial ATA/300 hard drive: $40.
Geforce 7600 GT video card with 256 MB RAM: $110.
Samsung 18X DVD-RW: $30.
Apevia X-QPack-NW-AL MicroATX case with 420W power supply (after shipping & $10 MIR): $86.
Total: $556 plus tax, $607 total after $50 MIRs.
I guess the extra $93 is the Microsoft tax. Of course the system I describe comes with twice as much RAM and good quality onboard graphics for those wanting Xinerama Beryl dual-monitor goodness, plus a slick little case, probably much smaller and handier than what you ended up with. Since I'm not a gamer I'd save a little money and stick with the onboard graphics or maybe add a Geforce 6100 for $40 instead if I wanted dual monitors. -
Re:upgrading hardware
The price must of changed since I last looked though, then the cheapest mobo was about $80, cpu I don't recall for sure but I think $100 and the last tyme I bought 128M of ram was about $100. That was two or three years ago and I'd want at least 512 preferably 1 GB ram.
That was awhile ago. If you live near a Fry's (many big cities in the U.S.) you can buy a combo with a motherboard, CPU & fan for as little as $50, though the cheapo combo this week is a lordly $80 for an AMD A64 3000+ CPU and an ECS Nforce3A board. Look on pricewatch.com and you can find 512 MB of PC3200 RAM for as little as about $43 and a gig is maybe $54. But you'll need a new power supply and that will run you about $30 for a decent one.
But it still may not make much sense to upgrade your current rig.
What are you going to do with your old "perfectly adequate until 10 minutes ago" mobo, PS and CPU? Put 'em in a drawer until you throw them away? E-Bay them for not much more than the transaction cost? Resell them to various recyclers? The boards are worth 80 cents a pound, CPUs used to get a pretty penny, like $18 a pound, but the vast majority of a PII CPU is fan, casing, etc. The power supply is just scrap metal, a few cents a pound.
Even if wait until you can get the best possible deals on the parts, maybe $110 after a Mail In Rebate on 512 MB of RAM, you still have to pull the old stuff, screw the new stuff in, hoping you didn't short anything out, and then reinstall Windows (or at least reconfigure X and your sound card for Linux, not, I'll admit, a big deal).
In the mean time you could buy a whole new system with a legal copy of Windows XP and a new 17" CRT monitor for less than $300 after MIR. Then sell your old rig for $75. Buy a cheap PCI video card for $14 and you are good to go with a dual monitor rig using Xinerama. Use QTPARTED to shrink the XP partition to 30 gigs or so, so you can dual boot, then blow on your favorite distro.
The motherboard for the computer has a number of things built onto it, the graphics is though I installed a second one.
Actually, if your second video card is PCI, you can run a dual monitor rig now, either in Win or Lin. Unfortunately, onboard video tends to be on the AGP bus, so if you have an AGP card you can either us it or the onboard. All new motherboards come with USB 2.0, you can buy a cheap firewire card for $10-15.
I wouldn't worry too much about exactly which CPU to buy. Practically anything you buy these days will have plenty of pop for most purposes. Maybe you should take that statement with a grain of saltpeter, since my primary machine benchmarks, according to KBoincSpy, a Dhrystone of 309 MIPS and a Whetstone of 110 MFLOPS, and I'm reasonably happy with it. -
Re:Not that cheap: don't even have to factor curre
Or for $180 you can get one with an AMD geode.
http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/20 06/02/17/15325.html -
Re:Overkill Dragging Customers Along
Obviously, few (if any) business users need anything more than a Pentium III running at 500 MHz. That processor is perfectly acceptable for business applications like OpenOffice.
I dunno, if you are running Windows 2000/XP a 500 MHz processor is frustratingly slow if you have a firewall and antivirus (and maybe antispy stuff) running in the background. Even with 256 MB of RAM it is jerky & annoying. Windows 98 running all the updates and background services seems really painful to me even on much faster hardware, say a Duron 1.2 GHz with a half gig of RAM. It just seems to stutter and freeze all the time, especially doing file management, to say nothing of its pathetic stability. On the other hand I have a 366 MHz Celeron with 320 MB of PC133 RAM running Vectorlinux Soho (KDE) and it is just fine. It routinely runs dozens of Mozilla tabs, my email and IM programs, music in the background, a downloader, maybe an FTP client and a html editor, Streamtuner, kjots, 3-4 shell sessions, maybe a little VNC, some SSH, perhaps GIMP for image processing, OpenOffice once in a while, or Abiword & Gnumeric. Really, it isn't that much worse than my machines with 5 times the CPU speed and 3 times the memory. Slackware seems even faster on similar hardware. On the other paw, my old 233 MHz Cyrix PR300 with 192 MB of PC100 really is too slow, even with Wolvix (a stripped down Slackware with XFCE and Fluxbox). I suppose if I used Dillo or Lynx & Pine instead of Firefox, Mozilla & Thunderbird I'd find even this old box adequate.Consider the case of memory modules. 5 years ago, 64MB PC100 SODIMMs were plentiful. Now, they are virtually extinct.
Funny, I just bought 20 sticks of that very stuff Tuesday for $43. Sure, it was system pulls, but it was Micron, double sided for your pleasure. Besides, RAM rarely goes tits up (although I've seen it happen). Much more likely you'll have a power supply or hard drive die and those components are easily replaceable and much cheaper today than those parts were when your museum piece was new. If your motherboard blows a capacitor, on the other hand, then you will have more work to do, but you don't necessarily need to start over. You can either spend $50 for a Slot 1 or Socket 370 motherboard or you can buy an Nvidia Nforce3A motherboard and a retail A64 AMD Sempr0n 2800+ CPU for only $80 on sale if you live near a Fry's. http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/20 06/03/22/15890.html/ And if you replace your CPU/Mobo you'll need to upgrade to DDR RAM, but these days you can find 512 MB for only $30 on sale. And you can probably keep your old ATX case, video card, optical drive, power supply (if it was decent when it was new), even your hard drive, if you haven't already upgraded it to accomodate your collection of art photos from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality.hamster. -
Re:$22/month for dialup!!??
There are something like 150 ISPs in the US that offer dialup for $10 or less (some as little as $4-5 with no setup fee and no long-term contracts).
Many of these ISPs are MUCH better than Earthstink. Call the Georgia scientologists over at Earthlink for tech-support and you'll be treated to tedious voice mail and long wait times on hold, vs. my $8 per month dial up ISP where you get a helpful human being on the second ring. You can find the dialup numbers and server settings within a click or two on my ISP's home page; you really have to dig for that stuff on Earthlink.com.
If you use Earthlink's TotalExcess Windows 'installer' it basically takes over your computer, starting up every time you boot Windows, replacing your IE Favorites with its own hidden ones, & disabling IE's location bar search, in favor of its own search (and no, customizing IE's searches did not give me a Google search back, I would have had to much around with the Registry). I didn't bother to sort it out, just switched my buddy over to Mozilla & Firefox. Their software really fought me, locking up the system when I tried to uninstall it, requiring a reboot & Scandisk.
Earthfink only offers you only 10 MB of space on their email server and if you fill it up I've observed them disabling your email account without even sending you a courtesy email telling you how to clear it up (heck, even free Netzero does that). After a friend couldn't get his email for a few days he finally got a message saying he could purchase more storage space for only an extra $2 per month. Well, you can buy an 80 GB drive for only $20 after MIR. In other words for your $22 per month Earthlink offers you a generous ¼ cent of storage for your email while Gmail gives you 2.2+ GB (220 times as much) for free. And then Earthlink has the effrontery to spam you with commerical email, eating up your tiny quota.
A few years ago I even had Mindspring (same outfit, different name) abruptly cancel a dialup account with them without notice just because I was online all night for a week or two, downloading distros, yah, that's the story.
So basically, you are paying at least $168 over a year more than comparable dialup service would cost, but at least you get a bargain on a machine, right? Wrong, that $69 doesn't include a $50 shipping fee, so its real price is about $120. In the meantime the Friday before last local retailer Fry's was offering basically the same machine with Linspire instead of Xandros for $100. (OK, the Fry's box only has 128 MB, but you can buy an extra 256 MB for about $20 these days.) Feh. -
Re:"Budget"?I agree
$189.99 for a Athlon 64 3000 with MB
http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/2
0 04/10/15/6416.html -
Re:Sure, good stuff..."50 cents a gb now?"
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Re:Sure, good stuff...
Not looking hard, then. Fry's 120GB for $59.99