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Can you tell me where you found that price?

Check pricewatch.

Just be careful which vendors you choose.

Actually this was kind of fun. http://www.pricewatch.com/ gives all the necessary links.

These are all-new, retail prices. Shipping + taxes not included.

CPU: 700 Mhz Celeron $18
MB: Intel 810 MB, with sound/video/USB/ethernet $10 (!)
RAM: 128MB PC2100 $15
DVD: $12
Case+300Watt PS: $24
HD: 3.5GB EIDE $17
Heatsink/Fan $1
2 IDE cables: $1
Total: $98

This even includes a DVD, not CD.
The hard drive was the surprisingly expensive part. The motherboard was the surprisingly cheap part.

http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=335&a=5215& f=1

93$ + 12$ for shipping = 105$

I should revoke ALL of your geek licenses :)

http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=335&a=5215& f=1

Scroll down, there is an AMD2100+ complete system. Keyboard and mouse too! $105. I know >$100 but sell the keyboard/mouse for $5 to make it even!

Well anyway, pricewatch shows a 2100+ for $105 (93+12s/h) from maincomp. Although it doesn't have a network card ... Now no way am I endorsing maincomp. In fact, there are a lot of companies on pricewatch with I approach with a bit of skepticism. Thankfully every transaction I have made has been no sig issues.

PriceWatch shows the cheapest "barebones" PC (CPU + mobo + case) is $56 (AMD Athlon XP 2000). $20 shipping gets you $76. Combine it with RAM and you've already hit the $100 limit (processor not included). It would have to be network boot only in order to make it, if you somehow got a free processor and/or RAM that is.

yes.

Maybe I'm just too old school for this, but looking at the cost of a new Athlon 64 3000 and motherboard is so low that I wouldn't want to compromise and get the Sempron.

I'd prefer to spend the extra $20 or so and get the better chip.

LK

looking at Palm, iPAQ, and iPod sizes

• SL-C3000: ? (screen: 3.7), 10.5oz, $lots
• Zire 31: 4.4 x 2.9 x 0.6, 4.1oz, $149
• Zire 72: 4.6 x 2.95 x 0.67, 4.8oz, $299
• Tungston E: 4.5 x 3.1 x 0.5, 4.6oz, $199
• Tungston T5: 4.8 x 3.1 x 0.6, 5.1oz, $399
• Tungston C: 4.8. x 3.1 x 0.7, 6.3oz, $399
• iPAQ rz1715: 4.48 x 2.75 x 0.5, 4.23oz, $280
• iPod 20GB: 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.6, 5.6oz, $299
• iPod mini 4GB: 3.6 x 2.0 x 0.5, 3.6oz, $249
• 1GB SD (for palms): $75

The picture makes it look like it is quite thick ... I wonder how it will compare to the above.

SD memory for palms is rapidly improving; soon, larger capacities will be cheaper, making a $250 1GB+ palm smaller and better than this toy.

(note, I have posted on this before)

I was looking at Pricewatch this morning, checking on whether hard drives have broken the $0.50 per MB at the top end yet (300 GB+), and was shocked to discover that 2.2 GB microdrives are nearing $100.

Am I dreaming, or is it possible to load Knoppix on to a microdrive, partition it to include a swap partition and home partition, and be able to use anyone's computer and still be able to walk away with over a Gigabyte of additional data? 700 +/- for Knoppix, 128-256 MB for swap, 1000+ MB for /home and saving configuration.

All one has to do is find an adaptor to plug this in to USB, right? Would a boot floppy be needed, or some other trick to boot because the latest Knoppix require space larger than a floppy.

I can carry a complete system on a key chain now, without even carrying a CD, as long as I have a computer to run it on? Wear (and cost for 2 GB flash) was an issue with flash cards. These issues are apparently dead if I'm understanding this correctly.

Honestly I can't stress how much I value my external harddrive. I have a laptop, and beyond addition storage, I use the HD for a good deal of backups.

Sure it's more expensive than CD-Rs, but you get a ton more storage, and a heck of a lot faster (not to mention the added space if you want it), and you can get some great deals (I got an enclosure and 120GB for $90) on USB2 or firewire external drives from http://www.pricewatch.com/ (just be sure you are buying the combo and not just an enclosure).

With this kind of space and speed, you can zip or rar files and folders and copy them over. More importantly, you can easily image a drive using one of the utilities already mentioned, and not have to worry nearly as much about fitting it onto 700 or 650 MB.

And with HDs going for about $1 a GB I would also suggest not quickly running to CD, perhaps just by a second internal drive.

...is so we can sound like old-timers to the kiddies.

[Me] In myyyy dayyyy...we didn't have no fancy http://pricewatch.com/!
[Kid] [Rolls eyes, thinking:] Pricewatch? Geez, get with the times, grandpa...try http://pricegrabber.com/...
[Me] We had to go to an actual store, where we paid money for a big huge thick heavy book, printed on actual paper! Aaaaand we had to search (and I don't mean with no fancy Google!) through the pages and pages of ads!
[Kid] Uh...really?
[Me] Hell yeah! And, half the time, instead of a price, the ads would say "Call", meaning you had to use the telephone to get the actual price!
[Kid] Man. That sucks.
[Me] [Wistfully] No, actually...it was great. All I did was party and get laid. Er, I mean, play games and code. I had my whole life ahead of me.

Ok, now I'm depressed.

Try Newegg. I didn't find any 20" monitors, but I found a 19" Sony for $579. The 250GB HD is a little too cheap, but it can probably be found on Pricewatch somewhere.

But would you trust it? Would you REALLY want to use a hack on top of something that somebody else provided for free for your mission-critical data?

Neither did I. What I don't get is the advantage. I mean, using no-ip.com and your average DSL account, you can turn your home computer into an "online storage" at a cost of around around $0.50 per gigabyte.

Wow. Those google guys are sure being nice! I mean, you gotta love these people, right?

For a community that seems to love google, this sure seems like a stupid, wasteful, and mean thing to do.

Anyone with 350 bucks can have a 1.4ghz XBox with 128 megs of RAM.

Anyone with 350 bucks can have a Sempron 2800+ Compaq with 256 megs of RAM. I would have used pricewatch, but I wanted a quick example.

I'm not quite sure what you were getting at there. Except that perhaps /. readers have an obsession with making things harder for themselves in the pursuit of knowledge. But I do think I just effectively doubled the RAM and CPU on your linux media workstation, no?

Ummm...

The funny thing about the Internet is it makes shopping at local overpriced stores a thing of the past if you put some effort into it. Get thee to PriceWatch.

Your comparison is terrible..an athlon64 CPU alone would cost more then a whole xbox system.

Your point is valid, but the details are a bit off you can get a new Athlon 64 2800+ for less than the cost of a new ZBox.

An Athlon 64 + Motherboard combo will be more expensive than a new XBox.

LK

Good luck finding a proc at that speed needing no fans. Most heat sinks rely on some amount of air movement, so if the proc requires a heat sink, it generally requires a fan.

Even laptop processors run too hot.. The centrino uses a smaller amount of power, proportional to the computation being done. It also implements heat throttling, so I wonder how effective it would be if you remove the fan completely (probably not very effective at all) since the geometry is quite small and the heat density is high.

You could even try going with an Xscale, which runs nearly 1 GHz at 1+ watts. At that power dissipation, it doesn't really need a fan, just a heat sink. It also implements the throttling IIRC, so will not fry if you run it too hard. I don't know if you can buy an OEM board for it though.

Then there's your price issue. I don't think you are going to get all that power savings you want and at the same time save money.

It sounds like what you really want is a super-cheap system to get you by until your next super-cheap upgrade. You may want to permanently stay 5 years behind the consumer curve, which is way on-the-cheap. Try looking at pricewatch for a complete system (your choice of OS). They have older models (such as a 2.0GHz P4, etc) for ~$250.

Here's a motherboard and a 2U server that use 4 processers. Pricewatch lists a few places that sell the motherboard.

But it's still too much money for me to be the one to go make all the first-timer mistakes and discover all the hidden costs. I guess that's precisely the reason most DIYers would buy a magazine like this.

How can I buy a transmeta chip and build a system from one ? I checked pricewatch but they dont list transmeta chips... and what sort of motherboard do they clip onto ? It seems to me, at least, they're cool factor (linus a former hacker) is very high but in reality it's very ambigious when it comes to the real world.

Love to put to get a mythtv box with a transmeta chip at its heart but I guess that's not possible so far :( :( :(

~ only those with Administrator rights can modify that portion of the registry.

Okay, you might also need some cheap hardware and a universal case-opening device

The only problem with this approach is hard drive space - it starts to get expensive after a few rounds of trading.

Try getting one of those $80 8X DVD writers from PriceWatch or other places.
Many places like Fry's on the west coast have sales on spindles of DVD blanks with each DVD disk selling for fifty cents or so. Each blank DVD holds 4.7 Gig or 7 CDRs worth of music; roughly about 80 albums in highest-quality variable-rate MP3 format.
DVDs can be oriented to certain genres of music, say all of 70's classic Rock on one DVD, the best 80 heavy metal albums on another, or the best 80 orchestral classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) on another. Then trade by hand or mail genre DVDs. Or offload onto DVDs the stuff on the hard disk that takes lots of space but doesn't get played much.
I'm into collections also. It's far more advanced than downloading. If you live in a large city, don't forget to use the local library to fill any holes in your collections. Don't slack on indexing and cataloging the collections with spreadsheets like Excel or Access also. Perhaps in the future people will use P2P primarily to trade the listing files of their collections and then use parcel post or UPS to trade the actual collection itself on media like hard disk.

Apple makes these things, called personal computers called Macintosh computers. Up until the G4 version of the Macintosh (or "Mac"), Apple used the Apple Desktop Bus for keyboard connections.

So yes, opposed to a USB keyboard.

An "Apple keyboard" is a keyboard manfacutured by Apple Computer Inc. Keyboards made for the Macintosh, therefore, would be called "Macintosh keyboards," or simply, "Mac keyboards."

Much like the usage of calling keyboards for (traditionally) Windows-based IBM PC clones "PC keyboards," "Windows Keyboards," or "keyboards that don't have a place for your one-button mouse to plug in."

As for one that you like, there are many to choose from.

Keyboard preferences are subjective. As much as you want me to, I cannot tell you what you like.

The only problem about shopping online is the "touch" factor. I like to touch, feel, and see what I'm getting. Then if it's what I want, the hunt begins. There's a Best Buy (and about six others in down) & CompUSA within 1/4 mile of each other on the same road. There's a Circuit City about 1/2 mile away but it's PITA because of traffic flow. There's also an EB in a mall about 1/2 from CompUSA. EB is inevitably $5-$10 more than anyone else. I'm on good terms with the staff at CompUSA so if there's a problem with product quality, that's not an issue.

The biggest thing I do with BB is to go look at something they've received in advance of CompUSA or something CompUSA has sold out of before I can get to it. If I want it now and CompUSA isn't the lowest price, I go to CompUSA and hit them with the competitive price factor; i.e., they've been never to be outsold by the other stores. It's a matter of make the challenge, they check the web site, and charge the new price.
If I want the low[est] price I can get and it's worth waiting, then it's PriceWatch or Froogle.

Oh, and the Five-Finger Discount still is in effect when it's in person. I went to build a new box and bought a 600W furnace. I opened the box out of curiosity and it had a 200W inside. That said a lot about the Door Nazi watching the cameras.

My trunk monkey can beat up your trunk monkey.

Where do you get a PC running Windows XP for Tablets in the $375-750 region? Please tell me? Reply with a link. I'll buy one. Don't send me a link to a 10 year old GRID machine either, or a Fujitsu running Windows 3.1 for Pen. Pricewatch has a couple of Wacom USB Graphics tablets for sketching into a real PC on in that price range, but not a Tablet PC.

I just checked Pricewatch, and the cheapest they've got is for $918, a refurbished P3/1Ghz with 256 MB of RAM. Here's a link to Pricewatch where I looked. A decent one with enough RAM to run XP for Tablets without constantly swapping would probably be another $100 at least. The cheapest I've ever seen one (a Viewsonic unit at my local MicroCenter, which was returned unit) was well over $800, add another $125 for a dock.

Celeron 2.0: $60
256MB DDR: $33
40GB HDD: $31
52x CD-ROM: $10
Lexmark Printer: $29
17" CRT: $74

Total: $237

Unfortunately for Dell, the market for the gamer revolves around the potential for business from the uninformed gamer. Every gamer I know (and indeed, myself) builds their own system for the fraction of the cost of buying an Alienware or a Dell that has the same specs. Indeed, as often as hardcore gamers upgrade their systems, none of these manufacturers can hope to provide the kind of support I'd need to make it worth my while. Perhaps if they offered free hardware upgrades for two years, I could see spending an extra 500-1500 dollars for the same exact system that I could build by surfing Pricewatch.com.

Pricewatch.com
Direct link to video cards

Good grief, those are some expensive parts:

550W, ~$200
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "EG651AX"*+AND+"VH"*&cr=EG651AX-VH

660W, ~$240
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "EG851AX"*+AND+"VH"*&cr=EG851AX-VH

TRUE550 EPS12V, ~$110:
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "ANTEC"*+AND+"TRUE550"*+AND+"EPS12V"*&cr=Antec+TRU E550+EPS12V

Good grief, those are some expensive parts:

550W, ~$200
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "EG651AX"*+AND+"VH"*&cr=EG651AX-VH

660W, ~$240
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "EG851AX"*+AND+"VH"*&cr=EG851AX-VH

TRUE550 EPS12V, ~$110:
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "ANTEC"*+AND+"TRUE550"*+AND+"EPS12V"*&cr=Antec+TRU E550+EPS12V

Good grief, those are some expensive parts:

550W, ~$200
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "EG651AX"*+AND+"VH"*&cr=EG651AX-VH

660W, ~$240
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "EG851AX"*+AND+"VH"*&cr=EG851AX-VH

TRUE550 EPS12V, ~$110:
http://castle.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?qc= "ANTEC"*+AND+"TRUE550"*+AND+"EPS12V"*&cr=Antec+TRU E550+EPS12V

3 Ware 12 drive RAID card

I I havn't calculated the per MB cost of all the large sizes. someone with more time please do this.

What will make this perfect is removeble drive kits (They require an external 5.1/4" bay for each 3.1/2" drive. Some even have little activity LEDs) and a server case with 12 external 5.1/4" bays.

We just added a couple of these at the office. We used a SATA RAID card from LSI Logic (formerly AMI MegaRAID) and on top of the 6-port device added six 200GB Western Digital drives. From that page, a 200GB Maxtor can be had for around $85.00. Add in a 2U case, which is probably the most expensive part at around $300.00, and you have yourself the most expensive components of what you need, subtract the motherboard, processor, and all that jazz (which can be had for another $300.00 or so). Running Linux LVM with Samba-3 and Winbind for full Active Directory integration and authentication on top of an ACL-enabled ext3 filesystem, of course! ;)

I am interested to see how this will affect sales in new CPU's and video cards.

I expect PriceWatch to feel the burn if it hasn't already. I used it as a starting point to build my last couple systems.

Aside from tweaking options, is custom built still cheaper/better than off the line?

I'd recommend looking into the FX-51/FX-53 chips by AMD instead of the other 64bit ones. I had heard that the non FX chips didn't perform as well as one would expect, whereas a friend of mine who got an FX-51 based machine has amazing power and speed.

Given that I've never used any of those 64bit processors (aside from my friend's FX-51), I could be wrong, but it might be worth checking out.

Oh, and if you don't want to go SATA, I just picked up two Seagate 200GB drives (7200rpm w/ 8MB cache) for $107 each; not bad deal at all. Check pricewatch.com's listings.

Um.. This is NOT the card that was benchmarked. It is a 9800XT in the benchmarks. NOT a 9800 pro. In fact the only cards shown in the benchmarks are well over $300 even today. Actually still about $400. which is because all the new cards are pretty much not available here.

$88 Athlon XP 2500
$69 Athlon XP 2500 333
$129 Pentium 4 2.53GHz

ever heard of http://pricewatch.com/ ? sorry i wouldve posted the whole list but eh the lameness filter caught me.;)

I asked for him to list the specs: 1.8GHz, 14", 512MB, "Dell's guaranteed customer support," etc. I fired up pricewatch, told it to list 1.8GHz laptops with Windows installed (argh), and I'm looking at the same machine for $550. The ram was only 128, but pricewatch is listing 512 laptop chips starting at $50.

So I interject that even without some "wholesale deal" I could save them $1400 per laptop, but the consultant douche jumps in saying "Well you could save a few bucks buying from some no-name chopshop or you could get the peace-of-mind that buying from a trustworthy company that Dell offers."

My point is that a brand shouldn't be this powerful. Yeah maybe they'll send you a new machine if you step on it or whatever but you could work out similar deals with the little guys. But god damn, we're just going to drop hundreds of members' total dues for the year without shopping around??

Detecting a wall of office politics, as a lowly intern I backed off to choose my battles more carefully. After all, as far as the guys in my office were concerned, the two grand a unit wasn't coming out of some Christmas bonus fund or anything else that could affect them. My question is, in the interests of keeping our markets more effecient and increasing the flow of stuff being spread to consumers, shouldn't the government subsidize heavy promotion of pricewatch.com?

Heck, Pricewatch even lists them.

$130 for a 200GB drive? And those are at discount warehouses?

Go to PriceWatch and you can get 200GB drives for $100 including shipping. I've got a bunch of them stacked up for archival of video and audio. My last two batches came from a place on their called US-Depot (or something like that) and I had no problems with them either time.

A DVD-R jukebox can give you 200 DVDs at once. That's $3600 (drive/changer) + $268 (1000 DVD-Rs), for (1000*4.7GB) 4.7TB@$4000, or $1.18:GB. That's almost double your HD cost, but you'd need at least another host PC, and multiple controllers for the 16HD RAID, which is probably another $1000. And another $268 buys you another 4-5 months storage, so by next April you're down to $0.14:GB; in a year you're at $0.12:GB. A shelf of 200-disc "CD" books will hold your archives, 1 book per carousel for "fast" retrieval. Backup all your DVDs offsite at $0.27:GB. As DVD-R prices fall over time, you're probably looking at something like $0.05:GB, probably less than even plummeting HD prices. And the DVDs (especially with the cheap backups) are much more reliable, especially over 10 years, than the HDs. If you are looking at 10 year archive, at $80:month in DVDs, for 29% more money you can add a second host PC/changer set, left in their boxes, in case the original PC/changers fail.

Well it isn't going to happen, you -HAVE- to drop change for what you want, as a back-up solution. There really isn't any way around that.
There are many plausible suggestions though that won't break the bank totally. One of course is raid as has been mentioned and will be a few times I imagine. But you may also wish to look into hot swappable solutions.
USB 1.1/2.0, Firewire and SATA are all relatively cheap storage solutions if you shop around (Pricewatch is a good place if you are willing.). You can convert IDE drives to USB with an IDE>USB box, and buy a few decent 200 gig hard drive for around $120~$150.
Another could be buy a SATA card and some SATA drive and plug them into the front of your case, SATA 2.0 is hot swappable and the hard drive prices have come down into a decent range.

Now another solution is buy used SCSI, and raid those together, reliable fast and not overly expensive if you don't want 15k RPM.

Another idea is buy another box, place a few hard drives in it, and use that box as your back up, but it's a hassle more so then the rest, but as a plus you can place it somewhere else as an offsite backup and all you have to do is plug it in and your work is ready to go (from the place you most recently backed up.)

With incremental back-ups it may not be too bad.

Then again you are moving terabytes.

Why are they scared of working towards a standardized future?

Microsoft would rather have Windows-only spyware.

MS don't like anything "cross-platform". Witness the whole java fiasco that took 10 years to sort out.

But back to the spyware thing.

What is needed is a "standard working set" of open, cross-platform plug-ins for all browsers. Now, they don't have to be mandatory of default but we have to STOP PROMPTING JOE USERS with ActiveX security warnings because THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS MEANS.

But, in the mean time, I would suggest to everyone in need of a few bucks to start their own "Windows Reinstall" business. Simply put up a few flyers at grocery stores (sometimes, even word of mouth is enough to get you more than enough business). You'll be bombarded with boxen that need a simple Windows reinstall. What I have been doing is simply swapping hard drives, throwing down a standard Windows image (you'll have to accumulate them as you get different hardware along the way) and then bring everything back over into a backup folder and let the user sort it out (or charge more to make it nice).

I do it for $50 a pop which might seem low but once you get a system down, it takes no time whatsoever. Just buy a bunch of cheap, refub drives of various sizes to keep handy. Provided the user's hard drive doesn't have any bad sectors (extra money here as well), there's really nothing to it. Oh - and make sure that the PC has a valid Win2K or XP license sticker on it before accepting it.

I do about 20/month which works out to about an extra grand in spending cash for approximately 2 hours per night that I'm usually just watching TV anyway. This is strictly drop-off and pick up service. Everything else extra.

Is this some sort of insult or something? The distro that has the absurdly expensive yearly-lockin, super annoying marketing practises, and does thing as root ?

As a linux user, I feel offended. I think the likes of Mandrake or Suse would be a MUCH better idea.

Sunny Dubey

PS: Just for kicks, Pricewatch supports LinBullShit too, *cough**cough*

It's not difficult to find a REALY hardware modem.
Stop wasting your money on what is effectively nothing more than a sound-card with a relay... spend the extra $5 and buy yourself a HARDWARE modem.
If it says "softwmodem", click the "next" button and forget you saw it... it doesn't matter how cheap it is if it's junk.

My sister just bought (couple weeks ago) a real, hardware, PCI modem for about $9, so you have no excuse to keep buying crap and supporting the companies who produce it.

Check PriceWatch for the deals... and do a bit of research before you buy 'em!

Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but I can't imagine buying five (fake) "modems" and still not figuring it out.

Agreed but look for pricing on froogle/pricewatch/pricegrabber etc first.

Not only does AMD have the only desktop 64-bit offering right now, but their chips are much faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed, even in 32-bit mode. Whereas Intel's engineers are just running their chips at insane clockspeeds, AMD's are actually designing better processors. For the price of a 3.4GHz "800"MHz FSB P4EE ($989 on pricewatch right now), you could buy two Opteron 246s ($441 each) with cash to spare. If you want to talk raw, meaningless numbers, the Opterons still beat the P4EE (4GHz and 2MB cache total). Of course, SMP isn't simply additive like that, but consider the advantages of 64-bit and multiprocessing, and the fact that AMD chips are /much/ faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed (even on 32-bit code), and there's no contest. All halfway-modern Windows versions and Linux kernels can support SMP, and the latest support amd64, too.

CAPACITY PRICE PRICE/CAP

300GB $232 $0.77
250GB $158 $0.63
200GB $101 $0.51
180GB $100 $0.56
160GB $77 $0.48
120GB $58 $0.48
100GB $58 $0.58
080GB $48 $0.60