What schools and universities generally do well is to turn out students who make good employees (a.k.a. wage slaves) but not good entrepeneurs or business owners. Even through college the focus was on getting a degree for job security and learning the skills to be a good obedient employee.
To be driven to get a high GPA means being driven to suck up to the teachers and school administrators.
To be driven to succeed in business means being driven towards making money.
A more intelligent solution would be to have a PPC daughter that lives on a PCI card and uses the host PC's memory, disk, etc
That reminds me of the old OrangePC boards that you could plug into the Mac and use its video, hard disk, and memory. The board was a NuBus (I don't know if they did a PCI version) card with the standard PC connectors on the back for parallel ports, serial ports, etc.
Having to go over the host PC's bus for memory and I/O makes things a bit slower, so you could have memory on the daughterboard, which some models of the OrangePC board could do.
I don't think such a scheme would be commercially viable. OrangeMicro has stopped producing the OrangePC cards. It's just cheaper to buy a separate system.
God forbid. Would you prefer to buy a stock machine with sub-standard parts?
I would hardly call the parts that Apple uses on their stock machines sub-standard. Back when PowerComputing was making Mac clones, some of the clones had sub-standard parts (PSUs especially), but Apple's machines were pretty high-quality.
If you're looking to build the cheapest PC you can, you're probably going to end up using sub-standard parts.
With Macs the motherboard will have to be an Apple design with their chipset and CPU boards. The sound, networking, and modem are generally on the motherboard. The last PowerMac I bought came with a Seagate Barracuda IV hard drive, so there was nothing substandard there.
Still, I do like building my own computer. I just put together a new system based on the VIA C3 cpu, in order to make a quiet PC.
When I sell to someone in Europe, if they can't pay by credit card, they have to send me a international bank draft in US dollars. Essentially this is a check that is made in Eurpoe which is payable to a US branch of the bank or a US bank. Any large bank in Europe should be able to do this. I don't know how much it costs to do that, but it should be less than the cost of an international money order.
As for support and warranties, all the notebooks I've seen come with worldwide warranties.
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To be driven to get a high GPA means being driven to suck up to the teachers and school administrators.
To be driven to succeed in business means being driven towards making money.
That reminds me of the old OrangePC boards that you could plug into the Mac and use its video, hard disk, and memory. The board was a NuBus (I don't know if they did a PCI version) card with the standard PC connectors on the back for parallel ports, serial ports, etc.
Having to go over the host PC's bus for memory and I/O makes things a bit slower, so you could have memory on the daughterboard, which some models of the OrangePC board could do.
I don't think such a scheme would be commercially viable. OrangeMicro has stopped producing the OrangePC cards. It's just cheaper to buy a separate system.
I would hardly call the parts that Apple uses on their stock machines sub-standard. Back when PowerComputing was making Mac clones, some of the clones had sub-standard parts (PSUs especially), but Apple's machines were pretty high-quality.
If you're looking to build the cheapest PC you can, you're probably going to end up using sub-standard parts.
With Macs the motherboard will have to be an Apple design with their chipset and CPU boards. The sound, networking, and modem are generally on the motherboard. The last PowerMac I bought came with a Seagate Barracuda IV hard drive, so there was nothing substandard there.
Still, I do like building my own computer. I just put together a new system based on the VIA C3 cpu, in order to make a quiet PC.
As for support and warranties, all the notebooks I've seen come with worldwide warranties.