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A PC For Tightwads

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the pinching-a-penny-till-lincoln-cries dept.

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.'"

8 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. cheap for a reason... by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ECS motherboard ... 250W noname power supply unit, AGP 4x support!!!!

    If all you want is something to write emails with or whatever then that's good. ... 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..

    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.
    1. Re:cheap for a reason... by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I wasn't aware that developers needed multiple hard drives. A fast CPU helps, it really depends. Writing code and running software isn't necessarily processor intensive. But this isn't meant to be a developer computer, I really don't see why that's even mentioned.

      I thought ECS was some company that just makes junk disguised as something that might be useful.

      For game play, one might as well just stick to a console computer.

    2. Re:cheap for a reason... by Professor_UNIX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It'd be better to have a USB hard drive that you can periodically copy your code over to in order to back it up. Maybe even have a program that automatically does the backups every so often. With RAID you're going to lose your data even if you have 50 redundant drives and you accidently do a rm -rf on the directory.

    3. Re:cheap for a reason... by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      first off, copying to a device like raid or usb is NOT a backup you should rely on. In my case I have a cronjob that does nightlies to the RAID then I do manual burns to a CD.

      Copying to another HD is a good temp storage but not a backup.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    4. Re:cheap for a reason... by Penguin+Programmer · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's obviously not intended to be a gaming or development machine. It's intended to be a standard office machine.

      An ECS motherboard, onboard video, small PSU, 256MB of RAM is exactly (it's creepy how exactly actually) the machine we buy for most people in our office. If I could tell my boss that a new computer was $159 (or $200 ... we're in Canada after all) including all the software, he'd be a lot more willing to replace the Celeron 333's we're still using. This can only help Linux by getting it into more homes and offices.

    5. Re:cheap for a reason... by Eightyford · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You must have a short memory or something. Five years ago the PC in question would be a spead demon, and I'm pretty sure people did more than write emails back then. Put Windows 2000, or Linux without the new versions of KDE or GNOME and you have a system that will fly.

      --
      Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
  2. Re:PC for the Low Paid by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. Imagine a... by el_womble · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...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!