Slashdot Mirror
The $299 PC
Skeezix sent us a
San Jose Mercury article that reports on a
$299 PC
being sold by Microworkz.
For the first time I guess, PCs cost about as much as TV.
The computer in every home dream is getting closer to
reality. " Update: 03/16 03:29 by S : In related news,
PC Free is to ship Linux-based computers for $40 a month
including Internet-Access, initially as a trial run. Link
from LinuxToday
Yeah, a really shitty TV
I would pay not to have a cyrix chip...I hate them
I don't believe that the $299 computer comes with a monitor or keyboard though...
Posted by DarkYoda:
what a shaft...
i would rather watch
grass grow
Can someone confirm if this $299 bargain comes with or without a monitor? It wasn't clear in the article.
It'd be really cool if Corel allowed customers to trade in their Windows Licenses for Linux Licenses for their Office products. $299 linux box would be
great!!!
It doesn't come with a monitor, but for people who want to upgrade their 486's, it might make sense for them to not have to pay for a monitor when they can use their existing monitors. people who buy this are not on the bleeding edge of technology who just want to have a computer to type in documents and surf the web are probably happy with a 15" monitor and do not need to spend the money for a new one.
No. The sr. model for $699 does.
The machine is targeted to all of the people out there that still don't have a computer (for financial reasons). They are not going to have an old monitor laying around. They are going to unwittingly but the computer and then spend hours trying to hook it up to their TV.
Indeed it does make sense. I personally would rather purchase a monitor separately anyway. I've been burnt too many times with cheap monitors dying on me. The computer itself I can nurse along, and I know enough places to get free/cheap hardware that I'm constantly tinkering with my system. But the monitor...I don't know beans about fixing them...I pretty much have to buy a new one when mine dies.- ---------
------------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
Without a monitor is easy to build, just go to someplace like www.pricewatch.com and try to configure a computer comperably. It can be done quite easily.
Especially if you set yourself up as a vendor.
This is not news. I've been building PCs for under $300 with a monitor for about 3 months now.
5 billion channels and nothings on
Uh, and in what ways is this superiour to the 486 its replacing? And if I already have a 486, then for $250 I can buy a Celeron 300A, Abit BX6 Rev. 2, and 32 Meg of PC100 Memory, stuff it in that 486 box, and overclock it to 450Mhz, which sounds like a win over this trailing edge box. Sorry, they're going after first-time buyers. By the way, for $400, you can get an eMachine that includes the monitor!
Hey I was wondering if anyone had any links to places that you could buy a decent mac for under $500. I would love to get a decent mac 233 mhz or more so I could run LinuxPPC :)
Natas
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
I've got the 233MHz variant in one of my machines. While it is not bleeding edge, it is certainly very snappy for running a GUI and most standard desktop applications. Even Windoze runs well on it, though the machine is usually booted into Linux/KDE. Video games run excellently on it, and even Quake II runs at a nice smooth clip.
It is no overclocked Intel Celery, to be sure, but it is DEFINITELY very useable even for many power users. The lack of a decent FPU is hardly missed. In fact, if this machine were available today I would certainly buy one because for once it is a lot cheaper than what I could build the same machine for myself.
Ok, it's a deal! Send me $10, and I promise I won't give you a Cyrix chip! For $20, I will come to your house/office and remove any Cyrix chips you already have! And for $600, I'll give you a brand new "Big Brother Inside" PIII/450 chip! Impress girls! Be the envy of all your friends! Act now! Be the first on your block to be able to say "Yes, I payed an extra $500 for something that's no faster than a $70 overclocked Celeron 300A!"
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
Actually I think it does come with a keyboard...
But the monitor is such a personal choice for most people. I personally don't see much difference between a 15" and a 17" monitor in day to day use, but some people can't stand a 15" monitor.
Most systems DO NOT come with a monitor. As it should be!
What a rip...
Anyone want to go into business with me making a $199 computer with fine print reading "monitor, hard disk and cpu not included"? We can at least say that it's upgradable...
Really though - cheap computers are a great idea, but they should come with a monitor, and Linux so that you could put a 486 in it if you want, and still get decent performance.
I see nothing earthshaking here. Besides, clueless people who buy the cheapest computer available are likely to get themselves into a really big mess ("My computer is broken! What is a backup?").
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Just remember... the "A Computer on Every Desktop"
is the motto of the Microsoft corporation.
The article itself is accessable but I get the feeling that Microworkz got /.'d. Despite the fact that the acticle claims that the Microworkz factory is geared to product up to 200,000 units a month, the fact that their web site got the /. so quickly may suggest that their web site is grossly under-powered for taking the hits/sales they hope for. This is pritty sad considering that a company capable of building $300 units should be able to put together a round-robin web server farm really quickly.
It makes sense for YOU, because you are computer savy. (Then again, does it really make sense to buy this machine if you are an experienced user - e.g.if I can't put in an ethernet card and hook it to the home network, I don't want it). The intended audience (stated in the article) is people that have not yet entered the computer world. These poor folks would not necessarily be able to intellegnetly shop for monitors. I pity the poor soles who take jobs for tech support to this crowd of newbies.
Not that I'd want it with Windoze but, if it cost $300 with Windoze, maybe it could cost a $40-$50 less with that fine creation of RMS and Linus and the wonderful and beloved cast of thousands.
If you read the wired news blurb, the pc comes with a years free internet access, and the corel wordperfect/office suite. The URL
8 491.html
http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/1
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
Uh, and in what ways is this superiour to the 486 its replacing?
Here at work, one of my two machines is a 486. One of my home machines is Cyrix based. There is a world of difference.
And if I already have a 486, then for $250 I can buy a Celeron 300A, Abit BX6 Rev. 2, and 32 Meg of PC100 Memory, stuff it in that 486 box, and overclock it to 450Mhz, which sounds like a win over this trailing edge box
Then by all means, please do. But you are not the target buyer. The target buyer does not yet own a PC or is PC-illiterate. If you already have a 486, you have half the parts already to get to a nice level of performance.
The other thing you are leaving out is all the other parts. Shop around and come up with a shopping list for all of the components in this box. Case, motherboard, CPU, 56K modem, sound card, video card, keyboard, mouse. What is the price tag? The 1 year subscription to an ISP is worth, to me, at LEAST $144 since that is the cheapest I could buy it for in this area.
Also, please see my post above about "Don't scoff". Some of you guys snear at the current lineup of low-end chips but to be quite honest, the current lineup of low-end chips could even satisfy a lot of power users assuming you have a good amount of RAM and half decent components.
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
I wonder, does the Microsoft tax figure into this machine? At $299 I have a hard time seeing how they could come to this price point while preloading an OS on it.
If this is the case, we really should be more supportive of these guys. Stop all the bitching and moaning.
I saw a company offering a $300 PC in Computer Shopper last summer. Cyrix MediaGX/233 (which, at the time, was slow, but not bad), 16mb RAM and a 1.something gig HD. No monitor. Nothing new.
Anyways, Cyrix chips are targetted at a lower end market than Intel, but they're really sweet designs (for the above naysayers). They also work closely with Linux kernel developers (they give away tons of slick hardware, and kernel developers have access to Cyrix engineers).
there seem to be a lot of people saying, "i can build a PC for around the same price and get better performance!"
but grandma can't. neither can uncle bob or aunt edna..... or the other 90% of users out there.
this is a CONSUMER machine designed to be purchased by "the masses". joke if you must, but this is how the radio eventually found its way into every home in the US and how the television followed.
yes, they're cheap, yes they're a bit slower, but they are pre-built and functional. overall, this is a GOOD thing for the computer revolution.
and think of the possibilities of shipping these thins out to 2nd and 3rd world countries. for
$2,000, instead of ONE commercial brand-name box, budding NGOs and schools can now buy 6 or 7, maybe even get a discount and get more! (and if you're in a country where components are difficult to come by, you're going to NEED a brand-name pre-built system, at least for liability issues.)
i think it's a good thing. maybe not for ME and maybe not for YOU, but overall, it IS a good thing.
-jonty yamisha
(joyamisha@vassar.edu)
...you could make with these.
(Sorry. Somebody had to do it.)
-- Alastair
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
They also work closely with Linux kernel developers (they give away tons of slick hardware, and kernel developers have access to Cyrix engineers).
It shows. Linux really hauls @$$ on my Cyrix 233MHz.
The only reason I want to go to a dual Intel 400MHz arrangement is because it is more economical for me. I have a bunch of older systems that are seeming slow (Pentium 100's & 120's, 486, even a 386 still in operation) and rather than upgrade them all, I will upgrade only one to be really sweet and just use the older boxes as X terminals to get into the faster compute server. The Cyrix 233 box will likely be used primarily as a standalone still, though, because for almost everything I do it is more than fast enough.
The one thing that really tosses my salad, though, is that encoding MP3's is slower than snot flowing uphill in the winter. Decoding hardly uses any CPU at all, but encoding takes about 20 minutes per song. Ugh.
I really wish this sub 500 crowd would jump on the linux band wagon and offer Linux P.C.s or simply OS-Free computers.
You would think that saving $50 on a $300 computer would be significant....
... the video card better support tv/out so the lower end market that the pc is targettered for, can actually use the PC for $299. Instead of having to pay $50-$200 more for a monitor to just use their pc.
Kids these days have mighty high standards. Now, back when I was growing up, a 9" b&w tv was a big deal. But a 27" color tv is "shitty" now? Sheesh.
"A Computer On Every Desktop (Running Windows)"
iSKUNK!
I bet this damn thing has a winmodem, so it won't work with anything but windowze98/95
kmj
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
They're trying to bridge the gap between the data "haves" and "have nots". Yet half their sales are from the web!
Rich
...cheap, low cost computers that everyone can afford, to get every house on the Internet. It's all good.
>For the first time I guess, PCs cost about as much as TV.
This isn't quite true. 10 years ago, PCs were $299. Just look at the Commodore, Atari, and TI machines of the time.
The $50 "Microsoft Tax" is primarily for technical support. (MS makes it's money in other ways, such as software bundeling)
Guess how much the "RedHat Tax" costs for tech support? $50!
Or are you going to sell a computer to Granny with no tech support?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
They were /.ed yesterday. I saw this at 32 Bits Online this morning and read a note to the effect that they had 7.5 million hits yesterday (15 March 1999) before noon.
I couldn't get in at all this morning. At least I could hit it this afternoon.
ahh the good old days!
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Hmmm... Web browsing on a C64 running at 1Mhz. GIF decoding alone would take forever.
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
hmm 30000+ (for networking) for a 100 node cluster. Not bad.
Or even better, 3000+ for a 10 node cluster. Truely afordable super-computing.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
You bring up an excellent point. :-)
I still regularly pull up my beloved Atari 800XL in a window of my PII 450 running the slightly more sophisticated Linux.
The good old days...
It's a Unix system - I know this.
that alone is $240...
sux they dont have more info.
this would be perfect for my
g-parents or my friends parents
who are looking for a cheap basic
puter.
-Z
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
I thought that was kind of odd, myself. Maybe the idea is to get the "haves" to piggyback the "havenots" down the Information Superhighway.
"I'd like to make a promise and I'd like to make a vow, that when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now
...I'm a computer savy reporter who knows the meaning of cool technology terms like
"International Business Machines Corp.", "3.2 gigabyte, or billion byte" and "56,000-bit-per-second modem"
Just thought I'd spell it out for you so you know that I'm real smart and know what I'm talking about.
This makes it all the more disappointing that VMWare is planning on selling their software at $299. Why spend $299 for their stuff when $299 will buy one of these? Throw in a $20 network card, run VNC and you get the same result...
I wouldn't want a $300 PC, but maybe the fact that they exist might entice VMWare to sell their software at a more reasonable $150 or something.
They pretty much explicitly say it doesn't. The two higher priced ones do. Its just like the $399 eMachine doesn't have one either. The $499 one does.
I'd kinda like to know, before I go out and buy a new PC.
Lastly, on the monitor debate, I'd say that the salesperson who moves this product had better inform the buyer that it doesn't come with a monitor, else s/he's going to have to do a refund in a few days, and no salesperson wants to do that.
which makes up for it, I suppose :-)
Even over a dedicated 100-Base-T line, my 1600X1200 NT workstation runs like molases as a VNC server.......
That's what I was wondering abut
I hope it's a cheap 4MB card that's good at
2d. 3d isn't important except for FPS games...
It looks very decent; from what I've read
so far;
-300mhz Cyrix MII
=3.2 Gig hardrive ( my hardrive is less than 3 gigs)
Microsoft technical support is an oxymoron, moron.
Check out eMachines at www.e4me.com
They run $399-$499 w/o monitor
Monitors go for @$100+
They got rave reviews from users on ZDNET postback
Yeah, a really shitty TV
Really $#!++y? You can buy a 27" RCA stereo TV for that. While its not exactly the top of the line, it is not "really $#!++y". Really shitty would be some crappy little 13" "Made In China" set, which you can pick up for well under $100 these days.
What is your definition of not $#!++y? 36", 48", 54"??? Must be rough to have money falling out of your @$$.
no, it does make sense. some people may already have an old 14" monitor that they want to reuse, or can get a 2nd hand one for next to nothing. advertising a $299 PC w/o saying that it comes w/o a monitor is a cheap trick, but actually offering a PC without a monitor is a good idea. hell, if I was going to buy myself a new PC now, I'd keep my monitor...
My only complaints are that I can't get their (eMachine) on board audio to work at all, and I can't get their Rage IIc to run with the XF_M64 driver. It works fine with the SVGA, so I'm happy.
Both x86 machines at home run Cyrix chips, just fine. Nice inexpensive machines, sufficient unto doing all my Linux XWindows and Sybase stuff, and my wife running her AutoCAD.
May not be quite up to the latest gee-whiz ultramegaflash 4D hyperaccelerated twitch games, but I grew bored with those a long time ago. (I once wrote a multi-player 'asteroids/spacewar' game for a VAX 11/780 with a Norpak graphics unit and a D-to-A unit for sound.)
-- Alastair
Cripes, I can get a Magnavox 25" with stereo sound, and whatnot for $300, and I consider that to be a damn nice TV.
People are so f'ing spoiled these days.
I would pay not to have a cyrix chip...I hate them
I personally prefer AMD, but I have nothing against Cyrix, at least not their current products. I knew a number of people who had overheating problems with the 6x86-133 through 6x86-166 chips, but then again, they were using generic Pentium fans and not "Cyrix Approved" fans, or were overclocking. The integer performance of the Cyrix chips actually seems to be quite good, and while their floating point performance has traditionally fallen behind Intel's similarly "P-rated" parts, the price difference has been substantial enough that you can usually buy a Cyrix part with similar floating point and a lot faster integer performance for about the same money as an Intel part.
They aren't so bad. This guy is just on crack. Anyway Cyrix chips don't have a great FPU core. Which means anything with games like Quake will be slower on them. And the use a PR rating. I have a PR200. It really is a 150 (75 Mhz bus x 2). I play Total Annihilation and Quake on it just fine, slightly slow a times but never-the-less just fine.
I geuss Cyrix got a bad rep when their first 6x86 chips came out, they ran hot. 6x86L fixed that and the 6x86MX/M2 don't suffer from that.
Well, sort of. pcmall has an emachine computer a 300 (K6-2) with 15" Monitor, Lexmark Printer and Flatbed Scanner for $650. Its more expensive but I've never seen apackage that cheap before.
It's really not as interesting as you might think, with the weak floating point unit...
for 459$AU, which is about $300 USD, you can get a decent tv, 51cm, true, its not state of the art
with teletext and multiformat and PIP and stuff, but it is a TV that works. And personaly the extra add ons like PIP/TT etc, frankly are a ripoff and arent worth more than $20 in the factory so it doesnt justify $999 retail
233Cyrix slow? get outa here, I have 166 rating cyrix-L from IBM on my girlfriends computer with 48meg ram and it runs quite decently, sure not enough for latest games, but damn good enough for everything else. If the 166 runs ok, then id be happy for a Cyrix233 or 300 chip for $40, as per $/Mhz , its the cheepest :)
Im not giving intel $800 for damn new Slot1 MB and $600 450 PII
We have a first-generation 6x86 machine here at Blair High. It runs Linux and likes to crash on the weekend when no one is around to reboot it, eliciting many complaints from students. (Under Windows, this probably isn't a problem because Windows crashes so much anyway.) It could be a heat problem or it could be the motherboard is cheap. However, this machine has never been what you would call stable.
I agree. That's pretty much the same TV I bought almost a year ago for about $250 (stereo, rca outputs for vcr, pip, etc). I can't imagine needing anything else in a TV. Then again, I might watch the thing for 4-5 hours a week if I'm lucky.
Chris
mtnbkr@mindspring.com
I was curious if you mind giving
a more detailed description of your
experience with linux on an eMachine,
because I am looking at buying one
for just that purpose.
Is 32meg enough for X on this system
(I noticed that X gets bogged down
with only 32 on my P200).
Exactly what version of eMachines
do you have?
Are there any expansion slots for a NIC
card or another hdd?
And finally, the modem isn't a winmodem,
is it???
thanks alot
-AC
What was that in today's dollars?
Chris
mtnbkr@mindspring.com
What a harsh environment. Your cold. I've seen systems advertised for $1200 without moniter. Geeze. It's $299 man. Did you think it was something more, like a $301 computer with a pentIII at 900MHz? Don't go shopping for a PC. You couldn't handle it.
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Did it actually say 300 Mhz? I just saw an article today about Cyrix. They list their chips by a pentium equivolency scheme. The 300 M2 runs at like 233 Mhz.
I consider it decent. 32 inch Sony Trinitron, $1000. That's damn nice.
Why would we want even more people on the net? It's bad enough as is.
Why would we want even more people on the net? It's bad enough as is. And you want to bring it to an even lower class of people?
I have an eTower 333c and it runs linux fine. Here's a list of possible gotchas, depending on your perspective on things.
Lest I seem completely down on the box, here's the good I have to say about it:
Do I recommend it unconditionally? No. Do I think I got my money's worth? Hell, yeah. Will it work for you? YMMV.
Buy a used PPC Mac and throw in a G3 daughter card upgrade. Cheaper than a silly-assed, fruit-colored Imac.
If I had more yuppie food coupons I'd do just that and sit it on my desk next to my P233 [It's that pesky informed opinion thing again].
Check with *shudder* the Jan '99 Mac Addict for more info on upgrading Mac's
The party's over
If you spend more than $300 for a TV, seek professional help or just get a life.
Perhaps someone should get one of these WINMODEM manufacturers to provide a linux driver for their
WINMODEM chip. With the chip specs in hand I can't believe it would be too hard to write such
a beast.
Isn't that what free software is all about???
For over a year up here in British Columbia, Canada, there's been a company called "IPC" marketing such scaled down PC's - $329 CDN (roughly $225 US, i think) gets you a nice and fast processor, integrated network card, sound card, video card, etc.
:-)
Well, we ordered one of these things to use as a quake server, flipped the top open and had a look. On the motherboard was a whole lot of empty space, all the integrated peripherials, and no room for expansion. Not a single bloody PCI slot to plug something into. If you want a non-upgradable machine, by all means, I'd suggest going for it... All in all for the price you pay, I don't think it's that bad of a deal, but I like to be able to rip my computer apart and put it together again.
Ummm... $300 is entry level for a TV or monitor. There ain't nothing out there worth buying for less than 2K.
My advice would be to find a decent PPC 604 machine and pop in a G3 upgrade. 233 MHz Apple G3's dont exactly run sub-$500 right now I don't think, but I remember seeing a special on old Power Computing machines for like $300 a little while ago. A 233 G3 card is like $200-300 or so I believe.
If you take that route I would recommend a card from Newer Technologies. There was a cache issue in upgrading 604 mobos to G3 chips. Newer is the only one to fix it in hardware, the rest relied on MacOS patches, ie no fix for LinuxPPC.
Microsoft is moving toward a terminal-centric and media company. You don't pay the licensing for Windows '98 but you will pay for the upgrades and the media service once you're on the web. The default homepage is home.microsoft.com. Your default shopping is shop.microsoft.com. Your default news is news.microsoft.com.
Each upgrade will cost $5/month. How's that for upgrades!
You have over 250 million people to exploit.
But we barely had BBS's back then, and the one Internet backbone was NSFnet and it was nowhere near as big as it is now. Having a computer (really what passed as a computer was barely a fancy calculator) was not as necessary or carried the benefit it does now.
CMIIW but don't today's desktop boxes outperform the room-fillers of the era where Atari 800/XL/XE, Commodore 64/128, Apple II series, etc boxes were "the thing?"
-- Shawn K. Quinn
NEVER buy from eMachines! They ship with Winmodems (actually HSP modems), substandard CD-ROMs, and are generally unexpandable pieces of crap. (I think I may have posted something a while back as AC about them, back when there was a problem with getting passwords via e-mail.)
If I could go back in time knowing what I knew now, I'd tell my friend's mom just how bad the eMachines deal was and offer to put together my friend's Christmas present computer myself for minimal labor charges. I'm certainly never buying one of the damn things myself.
If they shipped with a real modem, a real CD-ROM drive, and let Windows 98 be an option, yeah I might buy one. But they don't.
-- Shawn K. Quinn
Teletext? Is that what we US people call "closed-captioning?" It's **required** on all US TV's bigger than 20 inches.
A $299 computer though sounds like it's way too good to be true.
Teletext rules. Why is it that the US is one of the few industrialized countries without teletext on its TVs? Sure, it's not fully interactive, but it's a fairly good imitation, and reading a few pages of info about the program you're watching (without having to have a WebTV to go to the channel's website) is nice.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm gonna get 'im...;>
1600x1200? What color depth? 24 bit would mean the screen is 1600x1200x24 is a hair under 6 meg.
Of course that would be sluggish. But the few applications most people who run Linux need to be able to use under Windows don't need screens that big. For a couple years I've used VNC as a replacement for a KVM switch. I usually configure the Windows machine at 800x600x16bit, works like a charm, even over a 10mb network. Since the advent of the Mac server, I've been using that as well -- its slow, but its nice to be able to get to a mac from my desktop as well. I'm sure once the mac server matures some it'll perform as well as the linux and windows ones.
My point is that on my machine at work (Pentium II 350, 176 meg RAM, ATI Rage Pro) I get pretty decent performance out of VMware's product. Its noticeably slower than Windows 95 or 98 on its own, particularly in a window as opposed to full screen (with the upgraded DGA XFree86). Video display is kind of pokey, and so is the hardware. I'm sure I'd get just as much performance to my linux desktop using VNC on a $299 machine.
VMware is a good product at $300 for commercial use -- if I have to test a product against Windows 95, 98, linux, etc... its a great system. $300 instead of dedicated testing machines? Can't beat that.
But $300 to simply run Windows, its a better deal to spend the extra $$$ to buy a second PC. (Although in my case I'd just stick to running Win98 on my 586/133 and using VNC as I am right now...)
No. Teletext is a psudo-interactive system that many foreign countries have on their TVs. Basically, up to 999 channels of text is broadcast simultaneously with each channel. You go to a start page (usually 100), then it gives you a list of subpages (hyperlinks, basically). If you want to go to, say, 150, you type that in. Then, since this isn't really interactive, you wait until text page 150 is broadcast (usually not more than 10-15 seconds, since the 999 pages are cycled through fairly fast), and it's displayed.
It's useful for reading stuff about programs you're watching, getting more info about stuff, and seeing schedules. Quite a nifty system.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't think it works.
How can a window Pc without a CD-Rom?
What if Win98 crashes?
God those new trinitrons (XBR, ~$2000 I think?), but for the money, I had to with a 61" ProScan. Not the best, but if size matters, I like to watch TV from the other side of the house...
Honestly, I think it is a terrible deal.
I think you are bid to use the internet
services for 36 months.
Consider an interenet service for 20 dollars a month.
the remaining 20 dollars per month to pay for
PC. 20x 36 (monhts) = 720..
Well, by discounting, it worth about 650.
That is NOT cheap.
I have a PowerPC 7200/75 with 40Megs of ram, 15 inch monitor, keyboard and mouse that I am looking to sell for about $400.
I'm not a Mac-spert (Expert, get it? hehe) SO I'm not sure if this qualifies for a decent mac.
(Sorry, I would have emailed this, but NaTaS777 does not give an email address.)
--Jason Bell
--Jason Bell
Faster than the light of speed!
I got a 686mx at work and I liked it so much I bought
one for home use.
I also upgraded my p75 to a cyrix 686 166. I made
the mistake of keeping my p75 cooling fan. I have
never seen a chip get that hot that fast. I almost
burned my fingers on it (ouch!!!) Got a more manly
cooling fan and now it seems to work just duckly.
I like both my cyrix's; may never buy intel again.
Microworkz.com is back up. Problem is that all it says is that the page has NO information on the 299 pc. You click the link they want you to follow, and get nothing but the same Flash intro.
I wonder if their hardware stratagy follows that of their webpage...
A 233 G3 card is like $200-300 or so I believe.
According to Newer Technology's web site, their cheapest card is about $499 (and this is the street price).
Guess there will be a MS tax on those machines, the company is too dumb to be running a better webserver. I am still interested in one, as long as it is not like an Emachine where there are only 4 slots for expansion.
Rathead:
No flame intended, but what's wrong with the CD-ROM they include (It's a Samsung 24x on my box). Seems to work just fine for me.
I'm beginning to think some people post on slashdot just to see what rumors they can start. Can you show us some place Microsoft said they would do this?
No? You can't? What a surprise!
. . . for the price of only a few pounds of heroin! man, that's so cool.
This is a commercial, not news.
Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:
. . for the price of only a few pounds of heroin!
^^^^^^
^^^^^^
A few _pounds_ of heroin? I think you mean
a few metric tons, right?
-----------------------------
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
that used to get you a bad TV or a bad stereo set , now it can also get you a bad computer... bravo.
my TV was $400 (second hand 2 yrs old), my stereo was $700, my computer was $2,000. that gives me a pretty good TV, a pretty good stereo, and a pretty good computer. anything cheaper almost can't be "pretty good"
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
so I'll have to hand you guys that one :-)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
It's cheaper to just buy the case, MB, CPU, RAM,
NIC, floppy, and power supply - make a barebone
cluster.
and make a wooden case to hold the parallel mother
boards. and metal plates for shilding.
better obey FCC regulation.
While "RedHat" support may cost whatever you are not obliged to pay for it it you wish to get your support from elsewhere.
You watch entirely too much TV then. Try reading a book. I've decreased my stress level now that I cut back TV watching to 1 or 2 hours a week and spend my spare time reading.
Good point about Cyrix chips. I have one they call a P200+. It's supposed to be faster than a 200 Mhz Pentium. The actual clock speed is 150 Mhz, and it runs like a 120 or 100 Mhz.
I wonder what percentage of the $299 price is Windows if it is even included.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
"We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
> You can buy a 27" RCA stereo TV for that.
Actually, a 27" *RCA* these days *is* pretty shitty. Those Panasonic GAOO models are pretty sweet, though.
-- Rick
The only trick to using the early 6x86 chips that ran hot was to be sure to use the Cyrix appoved fan.
I have an early 6x86 150+ that's been running without any problems for over two years now.
It's high time for an upgrade. I'm gonna replace it soon and give the Cyrix machine to my 5 year old who's becoming very computer savy!
My TRS-80 Model I, in 1978, was $499.95
"about" as much as a TV.
Then by all means, please do. But you are not the target buyer. The target buyer does not yet own a PC or is PC-illiterate. If you already have a 486, you have half the parts already to get to a nice level of performance.
Which was precisely my point; this machine is aimed at first time buyers, not upgraders, as the original post claimed!
Fortunately, the net tends to route around prejudice. Remember, "On the net, no one knows you're a dog."
Probably only $50, if Microsoft is smart. They realize that PCs are soon to be disposable commodities, much like telephones are today (and cell phones will be soon.) so they know their current license pricing structure is nearing the end of its useful life. With all these cheap and ~free PCs, they'll be smart to move to monthly licensing.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
There's no way in hell I'm gonna set Granny
up to hold on the phone for hours...
Tech Support is rubbish.
It could be a heat problem or it could be the motherboard is cheap. However, this machine has never been what you would call stable.
It is probably a heat problem unless you are using a "Cyrix Approved" fan and heat sink. Standard Pentium fan/heat sink combos are not sufficient to reliably cool an original generation 6x86. The "Cyrix Approved" fan runs at a higher speed and the heat sink is larger. The top surface of the Cyrix chips is also shaped differently than the Intel chips, so the bottom of the heat sink needs to fit properly, which the "Cyrix Approved" ones do, and the generic Pentium ones don't usually.
Another thing to worry about is whether the heat sink is making good thermal transfer from the chip, which generally requires some heat sink compound (a type of silicone grease).
A cheap motherboard can also lead to problems with 6x86 chips, because they often have substandard voltage regulations, and the early production 6x86's require a lot more juice than a Pentium (which is why they run so hot). I have heard of problems with overheating of the voltage regulator IC's on motherboards that people have cured by jerry-rigging a larger heat sink and/or fan to cool the voltage regulator.
A little poking around inside the case can often help determine where the problem lies. Sometimes if problems either become more serious or go away when the machine is operated with the cover off, that can be an indication of thermal problems. If its a voltage regulation problem, then careful observation with a precise digital voltmeter may be necessary to diagnose the problem (watch for out of spec or fluctuating voltages).
Actually, a 27" *RCA* these days *is* pretty shitty. Those Panasonic GAOO models are pretty sweet, though.
I have a 27" RCA, and I am quite happy with it. I have Sony DSS unit, and I get good picture and sound (stereo) from it, from videotape and even from antenae for local stations. Actually as far as the $299 goes, I think I paid $269 for mine on sale last year some time. There may be other sets that are better, but the one I have is far from $#!++y.
Sure, it's not fully interactive, but it's a fairly good imitation, and reading a few pages of info about the program you're watching (without having to have a WebTV to go to the channel's website) is nice.
You might consider getting DSS. I have a Sony DSS unit, and the on-screen menus (which include blurbs about the programs is very nice.
It's useful for reading stuff about programs you're watching, getting more info about stuff, and seeing schedules. Quite a nifty system.
DSS (Digital Satellite) and some digital cable systems have this type of functionality in the US. I have a Sony DSS, and I find the on screen menus, schedules and program blurbs quite convenient.
Winmodem? Why thank you, my wall of crappy modems needs another. Rip it out.
:)
Pricewatch.com is saying you can get a 56K modem for $20. Considering you just saved somewhere from $200 to $2000, order a modem. You dont even have to get up.
Lower class than whom?
At least this particular one on my friend's box seemed to screw up royally when installing either the Red Hat or Slackware distributions of Linux. Funny how it worked perfectly under Windows 98.
I think this one is a 32X, not sure of the brand. It acts like it doesn't like to move data in full 64K chunks; it misses two bytes every 6-7 64K transfers. dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=32k works well while dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=64K dies a horrible death.
-- Shawn K. Quinn
FUCK YOU BIT?CH
FUCK YOU BIT?CH
My, what an intelligent and literate response. I am truly overwhelmed.
All I can say is that jealousy is very unflattering for you.
wow, somebody actually read a post of mine
eMachines being, IMHO, an answer to the iMac, I don't think some of its criticisms are valid. Yes, it's not top of the line, yes it may have a winmodem and subpar audio card. But as the previous poster said, their not for the "gearhead". If they work fine with Win98, great. A lot of the problems cited are Linux or alternative OS - specific, and you can't really blame eMachines for that as they never make any claims to the contrary. It was my impression that they worked fine for and where a steal for their target audience. Anyway, what we think is crap today would have blown us away a few years ago...the point is that the price is falling disproportionately fast, and that is sort of a breakthrough.
We (PC Free, Inc.) are currently in negotiations with Compaq to have them be our exclusive supplier of systems.
This is not true. We (PC Free, Inc.) are not requiring any contract(s), nor are we imposing any sort of minimum service period.
Here's the model: You rent the complete PC (monitor and color printer INCLUDED) for $40/month and we throw in the unlimited Internet access and other value-added services for free.