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A PC For Tightwads
ThinSkin writes "What can a $159 fetch you these days? Apparently a PC that includes Linspire, a keyboard, mouse, and speakers. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case took the plunge with this $159 PC and come out quite impressed--with a little cheating of course. From the article: 'If you're willing to spend just a bit more for some more memory, you'd end up with a highly capable light duty office system for less than buying Microsoft Windows and Office.'"
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee, you cocksmoking teabaggers.
ECS motherboard ... 250W noname power supply unit, AGP 4x support!!!!
... I guess. If you want a PC to play games with or develop software this isn't it. 250W doesn't allow you to have [say] a decent CPU and multiple hard disks. Something most home developers require. etc..
:-)
If all you want is something to write emails with or whatever then that's good.
I guess it serves a purpose but I'd rather see some innovation. This isn't creative, it's just OLD. How about you make a PC out of an IBM 405 [or 440] PPC processor, 128MB of SDRAM, 512M flash. some Linux distro, etc. That box would take far less power, be smaller and be just as capable to write emails.
Tom
[*] you could build the same PC out of a MIPS or ARM processor... I just have a PPC fetish lately
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
There are several angles to approach this. I think there are non-profit organizations in many cities that provide inexpensive computers. I've personally bought a lot of pretty functional computers on eBay. I am preparing two such computes to be sold or even given away locally now that I don't need them. Personally, I'd rather trust a $200 used computer than a $200 new computer. The trouble, I suppose, is finding reputable sellers and reliable models.
You might need a good PC for all your favorite games (unless your favorites are over 3 years old), but any cheap PC will usually be enough to run your favorite desktop apps. I bought one of those Linspire PC's for my dad for $269, which had 256mb ram, an 80gb HD, and a DVD/CDRW combo drive. It runs pretty smoothly. The only big downside is that they used a video chipset which was incompatible with Linux, including the Linspire that was preinstalled. And the hard drive is held in by only two screws, allowing it to wobble.
So what's her real budget? My parents recently bought a $300 after rebates eMachine, which has a sempron 3100+, a 100GB HD, 256 MB RAM, DVD reader/CD writer combo, and Windows XP Home license. Even better, a 17" flat front CRT and some Canon Pixma printer model I haven't even looked at yet were also part of the deal. Just keep watching your paper for local sales -- they got theirs at Office Depot. Now if my mom will ever actually send those forms in...
True, there's not a lot of room to upgrade, which is what I always look for in a personal system. I think that by throwing on a case you can upgrade, the extra $20 at newegg (how much I got mine for, which has 3 spare CD/DVD bays and 4 HD bays) saves you so much more down the line when all you have to do to upgrade is slap the new part in there.
I upgrade my friend's systems here at school, and the biggest hassle is always explaining to them: "Sorry, you can't do X, because you need another Y". They've got low-end mass-produced models, and no upgrade space.
With any computer this cheap, I'd be looking for a way to upgrade in, say, a year, when I could put in a GB of RAM and another hard drive for the same price ($150ish).
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
It's the old adage of you get what you pay for. These PCs are perfect for a first PC where the user might not be able to handle a high end PC's capabilities.
Not everyone is after a high end gaming machine. Some literally just want to use an office type program, surf the web, email, and play Solitaire.
It's the stupid salespeople selling these expensive computers just for the purpose of getting their profits up so they can win that incentive the big bosses put out. Not all salespeople are like that but there are that sort of salespeople out there.
There have been many times when dealing with people that I wished I could kiss my own butt goodbye
...beowulf cluster, ok don't this would suck as much at this as much as an XBox, but I think the target market for this should be geeks, not noobs. As the article said, in order to get it working they had to put 512MB RAM in to get it acting like a modern PC. I can sympathize with this, but really, should this machine be allowed a GUI?
It's got a good network card, a half decent amount of RAM and a harddisk. I'm seeing a fileserver, bittorent client, tomcat, CVS, distcc, firewall, game/print server etc. It takes cheap DDR, so if you want to run JBoss or MySQL that is a real possibility, but what I'm thinking is stick a $20 WiFi card in it, and stick it in a cupboard/basement away from harms reach.
I have a PowerBook and a iMac G5, and although both of these are fully capable of running all of those applications, I like keeping my development boxes 'clean'. Farming out essential, but resource nibbling tasks out to smaller, disposable boxes makes a lot of sense to me.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Everything was ok up until the ECS 741GX-M. That was the turn off point right there.