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How Cheap Can A PC Be?
geoff lane writes "Ballmer wants a $100 computer. OK, can we build a reasonable PC for just $100 and a copy of Linux? The rules are: It's assumed that a monitor, keyboard and mouse are already available. Ethernet connectivity must be provided. All components must already have Linux support. All components must be new and currently available. The result must be electrically safe for the home. Is it possible?"
Didn't somebody hack a Gamecube to run Linux? I forget who hacked what to whom... I do remember that the Dreamcast could run Apache on Linux, and that's probably the cheapest console to get to run something like that.... if you can find one.
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
Sure with a free operating system you could probally pull of a computer with reasonable specs. I bought a 35 dollar computer that is a pentum 2 at 333 mhz. Then I upgraded the memory for about another 35. Then you upgrade the processor to a 733 for about 10-20 bucks. Well under a hundred dollars and still reasonable.
My UID is prime is yours?
i think if it were possible, walmart would already be doing it.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
$26 - PCChips "M811LU" KT266A Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A
$41 - AMD Athlon 1.33 GHz, 266MHz FSB, 256K Cache Processor - OEM
$10.75 - POWMAX 320W Power Supply for Intel and AMD systems Model "VP-320ATX"
$14.50 - Artec Black 56X CDROM, Model CHM-56, Retail
= $102.25, ignoring hard drive or anything else.
So no, probably not.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
power supply motherboard
CPU
CPU fan
CD drive
RAM
hard drive
case
You can get cheap motherboards with attached video/sound/LAN. You can technically build the PC without a floppy drive or CD/DVD burner to save more money. Looking for the lowest prices around (via Froogle), for new parts, you'll find:
motherboard-- Asus A7V8X-X, $48
CPU-- AMD Sempron 2200, $45
CPU fan-- Anything, $5
CD drive-- $15
RAM-- DDR-266 256 MB PC-2100, $40
hard drive-- Samsung 40GB HDD, $45
case-- $29, includes 300W power supply
Grand total: $227 (not including tax/shipping/hassle of ordering from a bunch of places)
Some stores, depending upon where you live, have some really decent deals on packaged systems. I'm in San Diego, and my favorite Chips and Memory (yes, I hate their frames too), has a nice package for $239.
AMD Sempron 2200
256MB RAM
80GB Hard Drive(7200RPM)
52X CD-RW
Onboard AGP (Up to 32 MB) and Sound & Game Adapter
Built-in LAN and Fax/Modem Module
52X CDRW (Yes CDRW Included)
1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive
Med Tower ATX Case, 300W UL/CE approved ATX power supply
1 Year Parts and Labor Warranty
To get the price lower, you'll need a used hard drive, CPU, memory, or motherboard. Then you might squeeze in closer to $150.
Unfortunately, the total cost of an Xbox for use as a Linux desktop is:
Xbox port to USB converter - $8 x 2 = $16
Xbox off Ebay - $120 (seems to be average going price)
Xbox VGA box - $65
Renting MechAssault - $7 ? haven't rented in a while so I could be wrong here.
That makes it $208 and it assumes that the Xbox can be modded to boot Linux without buying a chip and you can find the right version of MechAssault.
Mind you, that's a hell of a lot closer than you'll get with almost anything else.
it can be done.
the problem, is you're talking about a 300MHZ Geode, and a 8GB HD, with 64MB RAM, and an integrated video/sound/ethernet.
but, it can be done, and it can be done "profitably"
... hi bingo
You may not be able to find a decent PC for $100 today but it won't be long until it will go for $100.
My friend and I actually do this. You would be amazed by the hardware we find. Usually we will grab things (clean things, they are sorted so all computer things are together, in a neat area) and bring them back to test and examine what we want to keep. Generally we find P2's and many floppy drives as well as some great CD drives and the occasional great find like a P3 that was dumped for some reason. We've gotten a few decent hardrives larger than 10 gigs. Not to mention many good cases and monitors and SD-RAM chips.
With this you can throw together a linux router on the cheap, like you said: $0.00. With the free software and hardware we put together Cisco 2600 comparable routers for free, MP3 servers and have created various other uses.
We even got a Mac G3 once.
We plan on moving our operation over to a ricer part of towns dumps to see what we can find.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
We could do this today with no problem. The key is economy of scale. The Via EPIA platforms would be ideal, but they are too damn expensive.
Honestly, if some inexpensive Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer wanted to, they could do a 1ghz C3 EPIA platform, and really cut it down. One IDE channel. No floppy, serial, parallel, or PS/2 ports. Kill IrDA support. Basically, give it only the following:
1x VGA
1x IDE
4x USB
1x audio line out
The CPU and RAM chips could be soldered onto the board. Bundle it with a cheap mass-market OEM hard drive, a case with a 40W power brick, and you've got a PC.
Rather than VIA, one could use Transmeta Crusoe or AMD Geode. This could be done for $100, but the margins would be razor-thin. Hell, I'd pay $100 for one of these sans hard drive with a smaller power supply -- I'm a big fan of LTSP.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
I dont need no stinking case
I was bored one day....
superman runs linux
plenty of tossed out systems running plenty fast enough to run something like AROS - Amiga Research Operating System
Its all about a small and efficient OS to bring life back to old hardware. Neither of which linux or windows is.
And it even has standardized user friendly level IPC, of which neither windows or linux yet has.
But AROS is currently lacking developers contributing to it.... and it is FOSS...
I would think that the success of Dell, Gateway and the like prove that a large number of people are that stupid.
A small-time shop, or independant builder, can pay retail and warehouse parts on components (read: NewEgg, GameVE, etc.) build the same PC that one of the major OEMs are selling for $2000 for about $800, add WinXP Home ($70, OEM) and Works Suite 2003 ($50), throw a 50% markup on top of that, and make a very nice profit for myself, as well as make the buyer quite happy with the $500+ savings.
I can only imagine how cheaply I could do this if I had Dell's volume discounts on parts, I'd be making a killing.
And it includes a pretty good spell checker.
Yes, I do have the ability to do it myself, but too many times I've ended up re-buying parts trying to figure out some silly incompatability.
Obviously, this is less of an issue now than 5 years ago, but it is still a concern of mine. I guess, to me, it's worth the price.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Apart from the fact you will be paying a good $$$ in power costs.
Assuming $1/W/yr (which seems pretty reasonable), and assuming it uses 75W, 24/7, that's $75/year. Or you could get a $15 linksys router which would do it all nearly, and pay $10/yr in power...
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
The Student /Teacher Office suite ($150) is a great deal - it includes 3 licenses. $50 per license is more than fair.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Via already puts the CPU package on the mobo; it saves PCB space and power leakage. We're not going for a powerful system; just a cheap one.
Fair enough about your statement with the RAM chips, although if bought in big enough batches, stuff like PC2100 DDR is already absurdly cheap and isn't fluctuating too much.
And yes, you do save on the connectors. If the volume is high enough, you can design a southbridge that doesn't have the legacy support. Or, you could go the route that nVidia went with the nForce3 -- no southbridge. Just one chipset with everything integrated. With no legacy stuff, that just means you need an ethernet MAC, and audio CODEC, IDE (or better, SATA -- fewer traces), video, memory controller, USB and FSB. That's it -- it can be a pretty small and cheap chip. Use PCI express for everything -- you only need like 16 rails -- 8 for the video, 2 for the SATA and 6 for the gigabit NIC. Or better yet -- no PCI type bus -- just have everything tightly integrated with local like nVidia does thier ethernet, and offer open-source drivers.
The board could also be small with no legacy stuff -- smaller than ITX form factor.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
i can run firefox successfully with 32MB flash, and 64MB Ram. This includes baseOS, X, ICA Client, Terminal Client, RDP, and network and printing funcitonality.
it runs slow as molasses on a Geode, and firefox is exceedingly slow to start up on the Geode, but runs "ok" once its up and running. If you give me an 800MHZ VIA, things work much more gooder.
OpenOffice? its a bloated piece of crap. work needs to be done on that front. I dont think that i can get it going in less than 256MB.
... hi bingo
Considering that the weight (if one could call it that) of WinCE is behind ARM, the use of WinCE for this product is pretty dopey.
These Geode tablets have been promoted since Nat Semi owned Geode (a few years back). Geode has pretty much gone nowhere and does not look like it will change. I'm quite suprised that AMD didn't rather put their effort into their MIPS device or license ARM and make an ARM device.
It is interesting to note that AMD is one of very few major CPU vendors that does not use ARM for their mobile/low-power 32-bit stuff.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
My first PC was also a 2-floppy Herc Mono XT. I had a 4.77MHz version with a turbo switch to get it to 7MHz. I remember running First Choice for word processing and Dr Halo for graphics. DOS 3.3 with NDos for long file names and other cool stuff. Ahhh the days.
I also remember getting my first hard drive fitted to that thing. Connor Peripherals 30Mb and I thought that was all the space in the world. I thought it was way cool that I could boot off the drive and install all my favourite games - F15 Strike Eagle II, Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF), and Zeliard. (Not to mention all the other small games like spacewar, elevator, frogger, yahtzee and boulder dash). I also coded in Turbo Pascal 6.
Like you I was in love with that machine, and that machine taught me most of the basics of computing.
It worries me somewhat that the technicians who are coming through the ranks now are not even aware of the heritage of computing, and have no inkling of anything past a GUI and a mouse pointer. Obviously the older readers will point out that before the XT there were things like TRS-80 and CP/M (neither of which I've had the privilege of using (although I would dearly of loved to have had that experience)) but all I'm saying is that computing around that time in the early to mid eighties (and before that of course) was raw and unfettered by the masses of clueless gumbies and spyware and spam.
I for one feel very privileged to have seen that era of computing and I can only hope that some of todays young geeks may stumble across an old dinosaur and decide to play with it to further their knowledge.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
The simple truth of low income countries is that when they are faced with unaffordable medical systems (including medicines and medical procedures etc) they simply die.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In the Ballmer article it states:
> But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations.
For over a decade, in the early years of Microsoft, they have been making piracy of their OS and Office software easy. This was a vital and intended strategy for them in order to firmly establish a marketshare dominance.
When the average user gets accustomed to (pirated) Microsoft products, this encourages businesses to use Microsoft products since most employees already have the skills in using Microsoft products. Microsoft then proceeds to enforce BUSINESSES to have legal copies of their software while still encouraging private users to pirate their products.
As you can see, their strategy worked. They are basically doing the same thing now with developing nations. And they will be successful unless the respective governments intervene.
1) Go to budget barebone PC manufacturer like
;-)
www.ikonpc.com
or
www.tigerdirect.com
among many others
2) price lowest barebones case that comes *with* mobo, power supply, CPU
3) add hdd and one memory stick (as well as CD player if needed), do not add MS operating system, aftermarket software, video card, sound card, or other overpriced extras
4) pay between $120 and $150 with free shipping
5) recieve components and assemble your ultra low price computer (~2 year out of date)
6) ????
7) profit or something similar
Not quite at that $100 price point, but pretty close these days, and even closer if you are willing to pick slightly less recent CPU, mobo, and memory. And no, i am not an employee or in any way affiliated with these or other barebone PC manufacturers.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Case in point, my girlfriend (there goes my /. credibility) bought a P-IV 2.4HT with huge flat-planel screen, DVD burner, 512Meg RAM and I'm surely skipping things. Her brother bought something similar (but slightly lower-spec) at the same time. Now, well, they bought this before she knew me.
So, I find out they didn't throw away the old machine. I ask her to show it to me, expecting a later P-I or even a P-II (it was running slow after all). My eyeballs nearly fell out! The fucking this was a P-III 500MHz, 10Gig harddisk, CD-Burner, 64Meg RAM. You can already guess why this felt slow...
Anyways, a 256Meg RAM stick later (which I always have lying around somewhere) and a 10Euro 10/100NIC later, I have it back up on full-speed. Nice little machine, really...
Oh, and you want to know what she does with her über-PCs? Surf the web, write letters in Word and ehm, burn the occasinal CD. That P-III would have done for the years to come.
So, in the end: look out for people that have bought new PC's and check out what they have in store. Anything from a P-II on is worth collecting. I have made P-II desktops for people without money from spare parts (which I collected from people thowing away "crap machines").
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
- Why _load_ Firefox/OOffice when you can run it
in the ROM? It might run a bit slower, but the perceived responsiveness is often determined by application startup time.
- Why _boot_ a machine at all? I'm ok with developers' machines being booted, since they
stay up 27/7 anyway. But a consumer who wants
to check something on the Net or write a quick letter can't be bothered to go through a 3-minute boot cycle.
- Also, it can't hurt to modify the hardware slightly so that a LED indicates there are new emails even if the whole box is switched off, to save energy.
I hope I will live to see a real consumer computer that is as much an appliance as a microwave oven.The only idea that goes a little bit in this direction is modern BIOSes that have a built-in Web browser that doesn't need an OS.
--
Try Nuggets , our SMS search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
...when I worked in a computer store in West Perth called Computer Choice, for a chappie by the name of Ed O'Connor-Smith. After watching him sell a computer, one friend of mine took to calling him Ed O'Conman-Smith which was a tad unfair even though he could indeed sell ice to eskimos or charm a starving baby away from the breast. He once sold a million-dollar mainframe on someone's petty cash.
Ed sold an Osborne 1 to a lady called Pauline Winter (no relation to the actress AFAIK) of Maritana Typing Services, of which I can find no trace on the Web. Pauline had a top-of-the-wozzer Olivetti electric typewriter which would do a steady 75 WPM and had a 16,000 keystroke typeahead buffer. She beat it. Easily.
The Osborne 1 scanned the keyboard in software in its spare time, using its (at the time) grunty 4MHz 8-bit Z80, with pretty much inevitable results. So Pauline brought it back.
Instead of refunding her, Ed upsold her to a KayPro II, which was built like a lab instrument and had a separate microcontroller in the keyboard and guaranteed 3-and-a-half-key rollover. And 400kB 5.25" floppies in place of the shiny new recently-doubled-in-size 192kB floppies in the Osborne, and a full 64kB of RAM in place of the Osborne's 48kB. Your keyboard probably has considerably more storage than everything in the Osborne added together. (-:
Pauline sat in the shop for a few days, using the Kaypro to make sure everything went well. Her typing was like rain on a tin roof, there was no way you could hear individual keystrokes, but the funniest part was watching WordStar.
WordStar is a little priority-driven time-sharing little universe of its own. It had an event loop decades before Bill knackered the one in OS/2. If it has time, it prints stuff. If it doesn't, it at least updates the display decorations. If it has no time for that, it keeps the current text looking good; and if not all of the current text, then the current line, followed by the lines above and below outwards towards the top and bottom of the display. And if not even the current line, it echoes the characters as you type them, and the last-ditch response is to just store the characters and echo nothing.
With Pauline at the keyboard, WordStar was able to echo two characters out of 3 if it was lucky. Printing happened for a few minutes some time after the start of coffee break, and for maybe 25 minutes of a half-hour lunch break, and for many hours after she'd finished for the day. She was typing at least as fast as a top-shelf Ricoh daisywheel could, and that's fast. She started with a blank data floppy every day (two drives, one for programs and one for data), and usually filled about 3/4 of a 400kB floppy by close of trade, so I'd guess that was a sustained 110-120 WPM.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's interesting the way a lot of these threads are going here. A lot of what I'm seeing is, "Well, if you just need a word processor, then..." This makes me wonder if we should be focusing some effort in a slightly different place.
Maybe what we need is an operating system that "just does" word processing, web surfing, and e-mail. It would be a bit of a throwback to the old days of typewriters and workstations, but was that era really wrong?
Sun seems to be trying to encourage one mode of doing this - the blade terminal. But, I think there are a lot of companies who are very worried about taking such a big step toward this setup. Not only do you have to spend a bit of time getting the networking for that system right, but if you don't like it later, you suddenly have all of this hardware that is completely useless to you.
I think that if you could get the same setup running on the x86 machines that are already in place in most companies, and also show them how they could buy cheaper versions, that would still work perfectly if they ever chose to go back to their Windoze platform, then you would really have something killer.
I'm sure that there are now a few zealots screaming, "This is exactly what XYZ linux does!" I'd argue, though, that even linux in its current state is a bit more than what is needed. I'm really talking about a very non-general purpose machine that literally only does word-processing, web browsing, and e-mail. And, of course, the qualifier here is that it does these three exceptionally well and extremely intuitively. I think there are ways to start with a linux distro and write some extra application code to make this system happen, but it's not there yet.
Sigh, back to my current Windoze business life. Counting the hours until I can get home to my nice, debian-loaded UltraSPARC. :)