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Here you go. Oh, and you wanted a slackware 3.x cd too, right?


Christ on a fucking rubber crutch. Lactating Mother Of God. WHO LET THE TROLLS POST STORIES?!?!?!

Companies don't buy brand X RAM on pricewatch. They spend the extra $$$ and buy real brand name memory that is guaranteed compatible with their systems

Okay, so then 1 GB of Micron ram for $200? The samsung stuff is even cheaper. NEC is $224. It's still not that much money to put towards ram on a decent business workstation.

I would strongly disagree... you work in the financial industry and your company can't cough up $150 for a gig of ram in every machine that needs it?

I agree that ICQ using 12 MB of ram and Acrobat using 20 megs is annoying and probably could be rewritten to use less resources, but resources are pretty cost effective right now.

According to today's Pricewatch, the difference between an Athlon 1800 XP and an Athlon 1800 MP is $68.

If you're like me, and you keep your computers forever, what's $136 over a 3-year lifetime when you can be assured of reliable operation? (OK, it's $3.78 a month for fewer crashes).

You can find 802.11 desktop wireless cards on pricewatch for less than $40 now. It seems that they could have put this feature in at a small cost to them. And streaming mp3s at 2.5Mb/s is more than enough bandwidth. If i'm going to use these for multizone audio as the article suggests, I sure as heck don't want to wire them all with CAT5 around my house.

You can find 802.11 desktop wireless cards on pricewatch for less than $40 now. It seems that they could have put this feature in at a small cost to them. And streaming mp3s at 2.5Mb/s is more than enough bandwidth. If i'm going to use these for multizone audio as the article suggests, I sure as heck don't want to wire them all with CAT5 around my house.

I was just researching this myself today and this site has General Use 4.7GB DVD-Rs for only $2.29 each ($57.25 for a 25 pack).. They seem to be backordered at the moment, but a quick pricewatch visit shows several companies selling DVD-Rs in the $2-3 range. Not bad at all..

Who cares? I can get a generic two-port FireWire card (or USB 2.0, or whatever) for $13 from Pricewatch, for my ugly but oh-so-expandable box. Hell, FireWire ports get thrown in as bonuses on video & sound cards these days.

That's why I won't be buying an iMac (or Profile) anytime soon.

Who cares? I can get a generic two-port FireWire card (or USB 2.0, or whatever) for $13 from Pricewatch, for my ugly but oh-so-expandable box. Hell, FireWire ports get thrown in as bonuses on video & sound cards these days.

That's why I won't be buying an iMac (or Profile) anytime soon.

Id rather buy on Pricewatch or ebay, ubid or my favorite Computer Geeks

Ive see complete systems for 500 bux, or Imacs for 600. Add some ram and a new video card, very very useable. Hell, I bought some e-computers for some people for 400 bux with rebate, (no msn rebate, straight cash). Picked up a monitor for 99 bux at a local Computer Stop and they where set.

It helps to know what and where the deals are, Dell, Gateway, etc are NOT good deals. They are average deals. Side note, Want sticker shock? Check out PC's for hardcore gamers, AlienWare or Falcon NorthWest

Try digging around on mail-order hardware mecca pricewatch under "not exactly new". There are some good deals to be found there.

As far as Windows for the Itanium, who cares? No, seriously, I don't know. I don't follow new Microsoft product releases unless something funny or terrible happens (Bill's demo crashes, or spyware). I am under the impression that there is a 64-bit Itanium Windows out there, but maybe I am wrong. That would be one hell of a lag.

Anything you're gonna buy will be way more expensive than just making your own. The system could be built on a reasonable budget for under $100. On PriceWatch a 600MHz P3 (Celermine) CPU + MicroATX MotherBoard combo can be had for $79, and then the case should be easy enough to find.

That system already has built-in sound. And even if you needed to use a PCI card, an Ensoniq card can be had for $10. You're talking less than $200 for a complete system that isn't just 1 function...

I'm sure if you looked around you could find something like an old 266Mhz CPU+MB combo for pocket change...

You could even install an IRDA Drive into the front and use a universal remote to controll the thing :)

AMD seemed for a while to be winning the price point war, getting to market at an extremely competitive cost for cutting edge hardware. According to my recent price-watching, however, this advantage seems to be diminishing, as Intel's lately been getting more competitive in their pricing in reaction to this. Maybe they're just going after the next buzzword in hopes of beating Intel at it's own game.

My theory is to buy the second-tier of technology. For instance, I just picked up an Athlon XP 1700+, with a ECS K7S5A motherboard, GeForce 2 64 MB card, and lots of extras, for less than $400 with shipping, because I decided it wasn't worth an additional couple hundred to go with a GeForce 4 rather than a 2, etc. Pricewatch is a great place to look.

And the best part is that I now have a fairly good computer and still have the money to upgrade again in a year or so if I want to.

Out of curiosity, anyone out here going to buy this top-of-the-line board, and if so, why? (and how do you get so much cash, wanna give me some?) What benefits are there to having the best computer out there vs. the second best? (I'm a poor college student, I'm also slightly curious....)

SuperDLT does 11 megabytes per sec natively, and 110gig per tape. AIT and LTO might go higher (I like the rock solid history of DLT over these competitors) throughput wise. SuperDLT does 39.6 gigs natively per hour.

Tell me what the problem is with tape again?

The problem is that SuperDLT drives are $4800 each.

I want a cheap, large capacity, and fast storage medium. The only thing that even remotely fits that bill right now are other hard drives.

If you really want just a cheap box like the ones the big boys sell you (Dell and Gateway at least use really crappy hardware - I know, I've tried them both as a home user), then just go to pricewatch.com and find out where to buy the parts yourself, or email me. I can build you a rather inexpensive, non-preconfigured computer on the cheap - i.e., no MS install or Linux install "tax."

Well, For linux on mac vs linux on x86, x86 is cheaper and faster. If you check out pricewatch you can good hardware at very affordable prices. I bought many 350+ dollar 1ghz pc's.

If its not the money, support for linux on x86 is better.

-
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. - Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Where are the 200GB drives?

Here.

Why is Intuit pushing us to store tax and financial information on their site? Why does Microsoft want to give us an authentication token that's good for retrieving our information "anywhere, anytime."

For now, they're giving you the option more for your convenience than anything. If you multiboot, or even if you lose your Quicken data in a hard drive crash (this has happened to me before), there will be an offsite backup of it that you can access.

Not to say that it won't turn into something bad, though. As most of us here probably do, I prefer backing up my own data instead of letting the software company do it for me. I am a big proponent of privacy, and I see a definite potential for abuse of these "convenient" features later on. But that doesn't mean they're doing anything bad with it just yet.

• D-Link DFE-570tx 4-port 32bit PCI fast Ethernet adapter
  Phobos P430 (same thing)
  Adaptec 6944a Discontinued model, cheaper -- still 4-port, still 10/100

  Or, if you're lucky enough to be playing with 64 bit PCI @ 66 MHz... there's the newer Adaptec stuff.

  Adaptec 64044 4-port 64bit/66MHz PCI fast Ethernet adapter

Now, to answer the Rick's "Feasible? Stupid?" question...

• Feasible? Certainly. These cards are basically 4 Ethernet chipsets put on one card. The Phobos one uses an Intel DS21143 setup, and can be addressed with generic Linux drivers (tulip.o) as 4 separate devices.

  Stupid? Possibly. Everything coming in from the internet has to pass through the bridge first, and thus pass its' rules. Nothing can directly address it. Pretty much perfectly invulnerable. The only real vulnerability would be a DoS, but that depends on the rules you've plugged into the firewall. In any case, it's impossible to directly compromise the firewall portion of the machine.

  Having the machine providing other services does mean, however, that if something is somehow compromised that your firewall is compromised too -- it's a risk you have to weigh yourself.

  Imagine you're running a webserver on the machine -- with a vulnerable CGI. Someone discovers this, and takes over what they think is "only" a webserver -- only to find they've taken over your company's firewall, too! Ouch.

Microsoft has a computer pad called the Mira, its not really a PC, but uses winxp's built in terminal services to allow you to view video/audio and surf the web. Heres a link for the Mira

I think the kids could use a Aqua as a seperate computer, they could use it for IM, Email, Web, maybe attach a keyboard or some kind of docking station when they need to use it for more indepth work. If the prices where right, and could beat a 300-400 dollar computer system from pricewatch then I could see myself buying it. Unless its a geek impluse buy for myself. :)

Even thou people are working on portable hardware, the remote desktop control is either TightVNC or MS Remote Desktop. And M$ Remote desktop is much quicker, plays video, audio and games over a lan network. Not knocking tightvnc, I use it on my unix and solaris boxes. Good thing the Aquapad runs WinXP, that will secure some good sales in the non-linux markets.

-
If I had to sum up in one word what makes a good manager, I'd say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act. - Lee Iacocca

Seriously, whether you buy a $16 sound card with SPDIF jacks and a used Minidisc recorder for A/D, or a full fledged USB outboard A/D and mixer (another link in case ebay flakes), that is the single thing you can do to most improve analog recordings on your PC.

Physically isolating your PC to reduce fan noise is also something you need to do if you're doing something with a microphone. But as soon as you get your signal into digital you're free of generation loss and noise. I can't emphasize the importance of outboard recording enough.

$355 - 3ware Escalade 7810 8-port RAID Controller

$2072 - 8x Maxtor 160GB IDE Drives ($259 each)

You could hook these up in a 7+1 RAID5 array, and you'd have a 1.018TB Array.

I was curious if there were onboard video on the mother board or AGP or if he was going headless. So STFW for"Asus A7B266-D Motherboard Specs" and narrow further and further realising that "A7B266" is not out there. I head over to Asus's MB Section where I see that that model# seems to look correct but can't find a match. I'm assuming it has integrated n-force. Just thought it was a little odd to not be able to find this board, I'm sure if I searched harder I could find it at something like Pricewatch, but I wonder why it's not featured at Asus's site?

My KVM switch just arrived this afternoon. I purchased it for approximately 150 USD including 4 cables (6 ft). It is a Vastech 4-port job I purchased from a company I found on PriceWatch called CableTron. NOTE: I am in no way affiliated with CableTron. The switch claims to support up to 1600x1200 resolution.

I am using a Logitech wireless iTouch keyboard (PS/2), a KDS VS 21/e monitor, and a Logitech USB optical mouse wheel plugged into a USB-PS/2 converter (the switch does PS/2 only).

Here are my findings so far: the mouse resolution is OK, not perfect. Not adjustable. The keyboard support is a little flaky. It took a few seconds for me to be able to select kernels in RedHat's custom lilo, but I was able to before the 5 second timeout. One of my PCs does not seem to like the keyboard emulation. It is a pretty cheap motherboard from some bargain basement PC manufacturer. The BIOS of my ABIT KG7-RAID doesn't recognize it, either, but it at least boots. The other system just hangs.

The beeps it makes when powering on/off are VERY loud. I will probably open up the case to mod the speaker later. Supports keyboard switching or manualy switching, and beeps every time you switch. Standard SCROLL-LOCK SCROLL-LOCK # ENTER combo. The keyboard switching only seems to work when the OS recognizes the keyboard/mouse. It has a 10 second scan feature.

In some modes, I found that my monitor emits an extremely annoying high-pitched squeal. It seems to be OK in normal operation modes, but squealy when booting.

The switch looks fine up to about 1024x768 at 85Hz. Bump it up any more and it starts getting fuzzy. This works OK for me as I am too blind to see anything above this resolution anyway! :)

In summary, it is a pretty good bargain, and seems to work much better with newer systems, but it's definitely not the best switch money can buy. The old adage applies: you get what you pay for.

BACK to hard drives, I have had great success with both Maxtor and IBM, and reasonably high success with Seagate SCSI - just not Medalist drives or the types with the nasty-medalist fluid bearing design, some barracudas (none RECENT) suffer from this. I have seen many IDE drives fail, usually on lower memory systems when lots of thrashing / swapping occurs, and secretary's need to have every "office" application open along with www.revlon.com.

Outside of that, since I work in IT, I have seen obscene failure rates with Western Digital products - there are have been times when ONTRACK got $3000+ for someone's hard drive having been failed, needs the "CRITICAL" data, blah blah blah (learn to backup - beeeotch, need to be a BOFH.) Dell was putting these garbage 6GB WDs in the Optiplex systems for a while and were really good at saying F**k You when you wanted them to do something extra nice when the broken hard drive cost you money and downtime. Cute Dell.

Aside from the nasty 75GXP, particularly the ones made in Hungary, the new IBM drives and especially the 120GXP drives are simply superior in performance, I'll get back to you in a few months on MBTF on the 120GXP, but I don't suspect any problems, plus I do in fact check the SMART status with the superior IBM support disks to see if any shit is about to hit the fan. The 60GXP was very reliable, but I never got in more than 3-4 months on that one. None of my drives ever spin down or get shut off, I think cycling the power all the time can piss drives off as well - just a superstition. For Win32 victims, there is decent SMART Defender software to give you an early heads up, I'm sure some *nix variant of SMART polling has appeared or will, I just don't care to monitor *nix operations that carefully because impending hardware failure seems to be easier to see coming... Just a feeling.

Touching on power once again, I would also suggest a PC Power and Cooling (overpriced) or an ENERMAX power supply, there are many other decent vendors, but these seem to get the job done, have a medusa pile of wires - more than any case needs, and are relatively quiet and reliable.

Watch the temp on some of the hard drives as well, keeping the airflow good is essential. I kept an 18GB HDD on for almost 3 years straight until I got my 60GXP (soon to be upgraded to a 120GXP =), and I have had several SCSI drives in other machines as well, and thank goodness knock on wood never had any HDD failure.

You can get them on pricewatch.com for $85. I'd hardly say that's a big price to pay for decent 11mbps wireless, especially if it's campus-wide like my school.

PS. Stop bitching. No one cares, really.

Dropping a high end card in an old box is nuts since most games that actually require such a card also require high end cpus.

Firstly, this is an absolute farce. Games that have been produced in the last year (i.e., anything using DX7-8) include code to offload most of the poly & triangle rendering to the GPU. That's why you can run Unreal Tourney @ 1280*1024 @ 35-40fps on a P-233 with a geforce3.

Secondly, in response to "I've never considered upgrading a PC a good alternative since invariably I end up replacing most components in the box to get what I want...

Upgrading my athlon thunderbird to an athlon XP requires only a processor change (very inexpensive), that is, if you were an early adopter of a motherboard that supported upward compatability.

• In 1980, I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette tape interface. Not a lot of storage, unreliable and quite slow.
• In 1983, I started using an Apple-II with its 140K floppy drive. I went through all of high school keeping everything I ever wrote on only 20 disks.
• In 1987, the computers in college had 20M hard drives. One machine I had access to had a 40M drive, and there was almost never a shortage of space.
• In 1988, I got my first 1.44M floppy drive, and found that it took a really long time to fill them. (I was working with 360K floppies until then.)
• In 1989, I got my first hard drive - an 80M model, which blew away all the machines that the school was providing in the labs.
• In 1991, I got my first 1G drive and couldn't imagine ever filling it. Until I started getting OSs like Windows and apps like Office.
• Today, 40G drives are pretty much generic standard issue, and 100G drives aren't terribly expensive either.

It's the nature of things. Engineering continually makes stuff smaller and cheaper, and data always grows to consume all available space.

Anyway, to keep this somewhat on-topic, it doesn't surprise me that archive.org was able to build a 100TB server farm. Today, you can get a 160GB drive for $275 (according to a listing on PriceWatch). 100TB is 625 of these drives, which would cost about $172,000. (Of course, it would really cost less, because 625 drives would qualify for a rather large bulk-purchase discount.)

I think you'll have to reconsider. Pricewatch lists RDRAM on par, or even under, the price of DDR.

I mean seriously, a 160GB drive costs $259,-.

That's 618MB/1$. In other words you can pretty much store an entire CD for 1$.

The advantage being that you don't have to dick around with proprietary formats or players that seem to have been designed to support the wackiest skinz but have a horrible user interface. Needles to say you have no degradation of audio quality.

It's half the size of a deck of cards, it runs for about ten hours on one AA battery, and it acts as a USB removeable drive just like your $239 unit.

The only difference is the price. I got mine here for $70 plus $5 shipping.

Add a 256mb flash card from Pricewatch for $80 and that brings the total to a measly $150 for a 256 MB mp3 player with zero copy protection, tiny size, and great sound.

Another kind of flashdrive MP3 player is the MelloMP3 unit. It's a little bigger and uses 2xAA batteries, but i got one for $60 for my brother for christmas.

Possibly the most interesting thing here is the compatibility of CompactFlash and IDE. If you do the wiring right you can stick a CF card straight onto an IDE cable with no other translation and it will work. So my idea for everyone, stick a hard drive under the seat of your car with a small power supply, then just hook the MP3 player to the car stereo via a Line In jack, and presto, you have a 30GB Car MP3 player for less than $200, plus you can take it with you.

Anyways, I hope someone finds this useful.

Muerte

Pricewatch, of course.

Also, Nextag. Similar to Pricewatch, but has more than just computer related items.

One word. Pricewatch.

Try and pick any electronics in your local CompUSA or Fry then go to PriceGrabber or my favorite Pricewatch and you will see there is plenty of good deals on the net.
Often you have to go thru a special Netpage or input a comment for getting the PriceWatch price. I find it a bit annoying but understand the reasoning.

If peopled didn't buy from the big guys like Dell, HP, Compaq, and gateway, I would love it. I build PC's for fun, I just got done with building one for my uncle. I checked prices against Dell, he checked against gateway - we were both really happy. He can pretty much do it himself now, and I had fun - wish all my friends would come to me for stuff like this - i'd do it free I love it so much. Or charge them a pizza or something like that...The fact is that a lot of the time, small guys who use Pricewatch are much (as in 30%) cheaper...

- dave

To find online shops I usually use "+price" so "bicycle shops uk +price" produced very nice results!!!
GO GOOGLE!
Whenever I'm shopping for something I have found that google will sometimes find lower prices that shopper.cnet.com or pricewatch

ebay has its half.com, pricewatch.com has its not-exactly-new section..

half.com

pricewatch.com

karma - whore it like you mean it.

Also checkout for yourself and you will get the following easily:

• a computer system (850MHz duron/128MB ram/20GB HD, on-board video + lan + modem + couple of free pci slots) = $315
• winXp home cd = $101
• 17"/16.0" viewable with 1280x1024 max monitor from my local circuitcity store (after rebates and taxes and $0 shipping) = $140
• TV tuner card (including shipping) = $55

Add some shipping and you have it all for $650.
And if you want linux you can easily cut another $50 out by ordering full packages from so many vendors. If you can get some burnt iso cd's
then its nearly free. I hope you get the picture now.

Got to Pricewatch, and do a search for Floppy Drives 5.25. I see about 5 places offering drives for about $5-10 US.

$55 for a radeon? Are they ... nuts?

Last time I checked, you could get a ATI Radeon video card starting at $39.

Note: This appears not to work in Mozilla 0.9.7. :-(

Tell Philips you appreciate their stance on fair use (even though, yes, I realize they have their own motivations):

www2.consumer.philips.com/global/b2c/common/custom ercare/contact.jhtml

Going to pricewatch and purchasing Philips equipment is great, but let them know your doing so and why.

Hey,

To make you drool, think Athlon XP with GeForce 3 Ti500 with the stability of Linux.

That will be useful! The $300 graphics card will be ideal for all the 3D-intensive games that are only availiable for Windows!

Michael

Yeah I read the article on Tom's like 5 minutes after I posted this article. Tech-Report gave more detail and I liked the pure 1200 vs. 1200. But the main topic was to point out that there are other new processors out there that don't cost Between $350 & $600

The problem is that you're trying to use a DreamCast as a PC replacement, and it's not one. The fact that it boots NetBSD doesn't change this, my toaster boots NetBSD and it's not a PC either. Cheap PCs are readily available from many many vendors.

Here you can get the full version of XP Home Edition (OEM) for $78.95 and the full version of XP Professional Edition (OEM) for $129.50.

And no, I don't work for that website. I found it in 5 seconds using pricewatch.com.

If you're lucky enough to find one of the original run of this Apex player, you can disable region coding altogether. Mine plays every R1 and R2 disc I've tossed into it.

My understanding is that having a region-free player is only half the battle... an R2 disc in PAL format won't play back on a region-free NTSC machine, but this Apex automatically senses and converts between the two formats. My one R2 PAL disc (Citizen Kane) plays fine on my NTSC television (and I would assume the reverse holds true as well) so you wouldn't have to jettison your current collection.

Quality-wise, the machine looks a little cheesy, but the picture is great, it has component video and DTS/SPDIF audio out, and all the features you could want. Best of all, it uses a standard IDE DVD-ROM drive, so all the moving parts that are likely to go bad can be replaced on the cheap.

You can also turn off Macrovision via the secret menu, but I've yet to feel the urge to make a VHS copy of any of my DVDs.

Toshiba didn't have much going on in the ram market for a while now...

Check out the toshiba pieces up on pricewatch to see what I mean.

Wonder when we're going to see the DRAM market bottom out.... soon as enough people drop out of it I guess.

-Berj

$660 isn't bad?
Since you obviously don't mind a non-mainstream processor, pick up a cyrix laptop, 1ghz, 10GB HDD, 128MB RAM, WIN ME, 56k, 10/100 NIC, TV-out, 1yr Warranty for less than 800. pricewatch
Hmm... tough choice...
They'll never be on e-bay if no one buys them new.

Don't tell me you can't find a USB CD drive for less than $300. Any computer new enough for games should have a USB port.