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Indeed. The whole situation reminds me of the hybrid gas/electric BMW I8 or Toyota Prius cars compared to the superior Tesla Model S car. You get some rather unnecessary compromises that way, at least in the long term.

Anyway, you can get a 1TB SSD drive now for under £500, and prices will obviously keep falling. These HDD companies better adapt soon or die. Drives include:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-960GB-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B00BQ8RGL6

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/128gbandabove/Samsung/MZ-7TE1T0BW.html

I actually bought one of these as soon as I saw it advertised in the UK. My work involves developing software for Windows, and we are interested in touch-screen devices, so it seemed reasonable to give it a go. The Android option is a free bonus.

It was disappointing to see Android 1.6 only, and now that it seems 2.2 is available, I'll upgrade.

I agree with the review article that the Windows 7 OS (Explorer, etc.) is not well-suited to touch operation. Try re-sizing a window to see how hard it is. Can you see the cursor change to a double-headed arrow? No!

The device appears identical (except for branding) to the Novatech nTablet http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/laptops/NNB-869.html. Novatech sells a fake-leather cover for their tablet with a keyboard built-in. For developing software, this makes the device usable.

The USB ports are supported by Android as well as Windows, so if you want to drive Android with a keyboard and mouse, you can!

Of course, it becomes comparable if you stop moving the goalposts to suit your own argument.

Try moving the goalposts away from this one: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/laptops/NNB-852.html

Here's some research I did quite recently (less than a month ago). Prices should still be about the same.

Bare minimum:
Dell PowerEdge T100 â" GBP 279
Quad Core Intel Xeon X3220 2.40Ghz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=305&l=en&oc=PE1T1001&s=bsd&sbc=%20server-poweredge-t100

4x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 82.76
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

2x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 163.30
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 525.06

Medium setup:
Dell PowerEdge T300 - GBP 569
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X3363, 2.83GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XT3001&l=en&oc=SV1T300&rbc=SV1T300&s=bsd

6x 2GB DDR2 RAM - GBP 124.14
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

4x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 326.6
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 1019.74

Over the top:
Dell PowerEdge 1900 â" GBP 1359
2x Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5345, 2x4MB Cache, 2.33GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XM2301&l=en&oc=SV11901&rbc=SV11901&s=bsd

8x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 165.52
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

6x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 589.9
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 2114.42

Here's some research I did quite recently (less than a month ago). Prices should still be about the same.

Bare minimum:
Dell PowerEdge T100 â" GBP 279
Quad Core Intel Xeon X3220 2.40Ghz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=305&l=en&oc=PE1T1001&s=bsd&sbc=%20server-poweredge-t100

4x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 82.76
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

2x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 163.30
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 525.06

Medium setup:
Dell PowerEdge T300 - GBP 569
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X3363, 2.83GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XT3001&l=en&oc=SV1T300&rbc=SV1T300&s=bsd

6x 2GB DDR2 RAM - GBP 124.14
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

4x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 326.6
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 1019.74

Over the top:
Dell PowerEdge 1900 â" GBP 1359
2x Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5345, 2x4MB Cache, 2.33GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XM2301&l=en&oc=SV11901&rbc=SV11901&s=bsd

8x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 165.52
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

6x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 589.9
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 2114.42

Here's some research I did quite recently (less than a month ago). Prices should still be about the same.

Bare minimum:
Dell PowerEdge T100 â" GBP 279
Quad Core Intel Xeon X3220 2.40Ghz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=305&l=en&oc=PE1T1001&s=bsd&sbc=%20server-poweredge-t100

4x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 82.76
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

2x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 163.30
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 525.06

Medium setup:
Dell PowerEdge T300 - GBP 569
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X3363, 2.83GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XT3001&l=en&oc=SV1T300&rbc=SV1T300&s=bsd

6x 2GB DDR2 RAM - GBP 124.14
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

4x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 326.6
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 1019.74

Over the top:
Dell PowerEdge 1900 â" GBP 1359
2x Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5345, 2x4MB Cache, 2.33GHz
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&kc=N4XM2301&l=en&oc=SV11901&rbc=SV11901&s=bsd

8x 2GB DDR2 RAM â" GBP 165.52
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT25664AA667

6x 1TB 32MB Cache 7200RPM HD â" GBP 589.9
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-10EADS

Total: GBP 2114.42

look at Novatech they have all their headline prices without operating system. You can specify various flavours of windows as an optional extra. In fact look at this one
No Operating System Installed £249.99 inc vat
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition £299.99 inc vat
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic £329.00 inc vat
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium £339.00 inc vat
Microsoft Windows Vista Business £349.00 inc vat
Microsoft Windows XP Professional £359.00 inc vat

look at Novatech they have all their headline prices without operating system. You can specify various flavours of windows as an optional extra. In fact look at this one
No Operating System Installed £249.99 inc vat
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition £299.99 inc vat
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic £329.00 inc vat
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium £339.00 inc vat
Microsoft Windows Vista Business £349.00 inc vat
Microsoft Windows XP Professional £359.00 inc vat

In the UK, there's Novatech who we found because we were looking for a laptop without Windows. They were the only company that we found that sold decent laptops without an O/S, so we bought from them.

Let's entertain your ridiculous position for a moment.

Novatech currently sell the following parts:-

28 different AM2 motherboards.
21 different AM2 processors.
111 different PCI-E graphics cards.
17 sound cards.

So far, we have 1,109,556 different combinations of hardware you can build. That already exceeds my "10,000 combinations is less than 1% of the possible hardware and software configurations" comment.

Bear in mind that we haven't covered:
SATA/IDE hard drives
DVD writers
PCI cards of all types
USB devices
Anything from Intel whatsoever.

This probably won't help anyone outside the UK, but http://www.novatech.co.uk/ sell systems (including laptops) without any OS at all, and these seem to go for about 50GBP (100USD) less than with the cheapest MS OS (currently XP).

I'm guessing it's not the same for all flash, for instance this usb memory stick is rated at speeds of 900KB/s for writing and 4.3MB/s for reading, much slower than a hard-disk (at least for reading, not sure about hard-drive write speeds). Other memory sticks on that site list read speeds below what I'd expect from a hard drive.

Novatech, for example, has always sold the OS separately:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/

Maybe not the best-known PC vendor but a well-established company.

Tim

No-OS, Computers without Operating System (for those who want to install their own Operating System):

  http://www.abestpc.com/laptop.htm Laptops

  http://www.adamant.com/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.avadirect.com/ Desktops Laptops
  http://www.com4.nl/ Desktops
  http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.goldenelectronics.co.uk/ Desktops
  http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.ion-technologies.com/ Laptops
  http://store.madtux.org/ Desktops/

  http://www.laptopchoice.com.au/ Laptops
  http://www.mtechlaptops.com/ Laptops

  http://www.mwave.com/ Laptops
  http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/ Desktops Laptops

  http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/ Laptops
  http://www.powernotebooks.com/ Laptops

  http://www.rjtech.com/ Laptops
  http://www.topmicrousa.com/laptops-notebooks.html Laptops

  http://www.unitedmicro.com/ Desktops Laptops
  http://xnbs.com/ Laptops

  http://www.xtremenotebooks.com/ Laptops
  http://www.zepto.com/ Laptops
 
  http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/23168/

I thought the MacBooks were fairly good value, but it turns out that you can get Clevo laptops for a bit less, with more RAM, and bigger hard disks. No FireWire though.

http://novatech.co.uk/ allow you to buy laptop/notebook products without an os installed. you choose if you want no os, win xp home, pro or media installed when you purchase the machine. this is where I buy mine from os free I may add.

Check out the nPod: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?N OV-MP3B1G !

I doubt it. Anyone capable of installing an OS is probably capable of finding a computer store that will sell you a blank box. (example) Besides that, with a blank box, you won't get support, so that rules it out as an option for many people, and MS may just have a problem with their retailers selling other OSs preinstalled.

Someone who knows what they're doing with a pc won't buy it from PC World (or local equivalent).

He upgraded that to a beefier gemini later on, but apart from playing around in Z80 assembler I never really got to use that one. After that he got a compaq 8086 which was destined to be my first computer. I remember it well, 2 * 5 1/4 " floppies. In fact I still have that machine and (AFAIK) it still runs (I must dig it out and try it). That's back when Norton actually made some useful software !

After that I had a brief fling with a 286 and windows 3.1 before upgrading to a 386 and the same OS.

After the Pentium had been around for a while (50, 60 and 66 mhz) I built my first machine - A whopping 75mhz cpu with 32MB ram and an 850 MB hard disk. That damn hard disk cost me £350 back then ! ('95 ?). I couldn't afford a cd drive so I had to get win95 on floppies - 14 of them ! When I did get a cd drive and speakers Doom was cool though, especially with Rob Zombie playing as the game music.

After that, I upgraded to a 200 mhz cpu and then on to a cyrix 300mhz socket 7. That chip and various upgrades lasted me until 2000 (!) when I splashed out and got an AMD 1400 T-bird with new everything (and a flashy Elsa Gladiac 920 Nvidia based graphics card). I still have that box, although it is on an AMD XP2200 chip now and is only used for games and TV (windows 98se). I still have the T-bird 1400 on a board somewhere, I was using it for running a FBSD web server.

My next box will have a bit more beef though -
Tyan K8WE (S2895) Dual Opteron DDR400 SLI with dual 246 Opterons and 4 GB RAM and 1TB SATA goodness. I am trying to get more into video editing so I need a bit of muscle. Interestingly, this machine will cost roughly the same as the the P75 system cost back in 95/96.

Ooops, I seemed to have drifted off topic slightly, but as all this has taken place in around 20 years, it is amazing what we take for granted these days. Likewise the internet. I built my first web page using Netscape Composer using dial up when 1 meg download took 7 minutes. Now I get around 70MB in that time, and thats not stretching the technology even slightly.

Memories eh...

Also, it may be different where you are, but I don't know of any retailers near me which bundle office with their pcs. (Ms Works or a 60-day Office trial is quite common however).

1. People buy DVDs in shops? Strange stuff, I swear by Amazon.co.uk (it's got search, and a great selection).

2. Agree

3. I tend to only find DVD storage space an issue for TV shows (to anyone producing TV shows on DVD - putting your DVDs one to a box is a massive waste of space). If it's a real nuisance for you, invest in a DVD folder. Sure, you lose the pretty packaging, but it doesn't seem you wanted it anyway.

4. Never saw this as a big problem. Just sort your DVDs alphabetically then perform a binary search across them :)

5. Unskippable parts make me want to kill the person responsible, slowly. Region codes mostly just irk me, although that may be because they're easy to work around these days. CSS doesn't bother me, except for the fact that I can neither back up DVDs, nor get a free replacement if I send one back to the manufacturer. Mostly this seems to be an issue with movie publishers believing they're doing the customer a favour by letting buy (a license to watch???) their content.

Hello, Tirthas. Interesting question, thank you for asking Slashdot! I should say I am not really qualified to answer your question because I have not ever managed an IT budget personally. However, products like AutoCAD LT 2006 are licenced on a per-seat basis http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?A UT-118961 I believe. If there are 20 members of staff I expect your employer plans to expand. A per-seat calculation could help the business owner decide whether to take on another member of staff by giving an idea of what expense to allow for an extra seat.

I would not use percentage of revenue because questions of revenue are not yours to ask IMHO. Revenue may go up and down but staff count may be relatively stable I expect. If avoiding percentage of revenue saves you having to do recalcuations, it will have the golden virtue of being the simpler method.

Those in Northern Ireland will know that the biggest problem for us is pp charges. To help with this i've compiled a wee list of shops and charges usually for something small and light like an ethernet card. Sorry if any of it is wrong - if so please contact the site and let them know that they need to make it clearer.

• CCL Computers Online 10 extra. 3.95 for small order 7.50 large all + VAT
• Insight Direct 19.99
• MicroWarehouse claim they don't ship outside uk mainland
• SavaStore 15 + VAT extra
• Scan Computers UK citylink so expensive - they quote 7 + VAT for non-NI will contact you for exact pricing
• Simply Computers 12.95 + VAT
• Overclockers UK 3.48 + VAT 2nd class recorded
• ebuyer 15 surcharge on NI p&p
• Komplett.co.uk approx 10 p&p
• aria .co. uk 11.95 + VAT for under 8KG
• Novatech 15 extra p&p
• Kustom PCs
• Tekheads.co.uk RM Recorded from 2.85
• mini-itx.com 8 - 12 +VAT
• LinITX.com 2.39 recorded or 6.05 next day special (+ VAT i think)
• TheCoolingShop.com free delivery on orders over 4 but under 2KG - over 2KG = 20
• PC Nextday 17.61 inc. VAT next day
• Leapfrog Computers Ltd 6.90 + VAT
• Chillblast 1.18 inc VAT recorded 5.29 special
• Stuff-uk.net under 100g 3.75, under 500g 4.05, under 1KG 5.25, under 3KG 6.60, large over 1KG 10.50, all + VAT
• CaseTech.co.uk from 2.95 based on weight for 3-4 day courier. guess + VAT
• Crucial UK over 25 free p&p. under 25 2.95
• Over-Clock UK from 1.42 2nd class post to 4.59 citylink
• Micro Direct Ltd. 17.63 inc. VAT
• Carrera SSC 64 for complete system
• MESH Computers 20 inc. VAT
• dabs.com 5.88 inc. VAT extra

I'm a fan of www.novatech.co.uk myself.

I don't think there would be a need for a seperate "personal server". The device would respond to requests from files, and any server-like features are just response to complex requests. You could organize it around a whole XML-RPC framework with specific types of requests all of which are heavily geared towards processing on the client side at presentation time. You provide the data in a standardized format (or use some fancy XML markup) and keep it in there.

Also, I don't think that using microdrives is a good idea because solid state is better suited for battery operation. Plus you don't need expensive drive electronics to deal with user handling. You can translate those savings into larger storage capacities.

If you were worried about making huge volumes of data available, I would be carrying around a USB-enabled notebook drive, not a repurposed iPod.

Novatech, our local PC outlet, will sell you a laptop (or any PC for that matter) with no OS on it.

Their website is here. Only catch is I don't think their laptops do firewire.

Hehe... I bought this card. What a cheapskate I am.