OT - Looking for a new computer

[Fyron]

Thermodyne said:
Dell will give you the most bang for the buck. Building your own would allow you to custom fit it to your specific needs. But unless you are going ultra high end, it will cost more than a dell of the same speed.

I disagree. Every system I have custom built for the last 3 years, including many on the low end, has cost less than half of equivalent Dell PCs. I always bring a Dell catalogue to computer fairs for a good laugh.

[Thermodyne]

Cataloge price includes software, pull that off and you'll get a lower price. I never push consumer lines from anyone, always go to the business part of the site.

[Caduceus]

I bought a few books, read a lot on the internet, and built a AMD 3700+ system from the ground up with quality components for about $1400. (Which I know is too much for a lot of people around here.)

I wanted quality parts which had warranties and built it in a quality case - Antec P160
1 gig of RAM
Radeon X800 XL
DVD+R
On-board sound with an Asus Motherboard
WinXP Pro SP2
Zalman fan

I had to replace my Compaq, purchased in 1999, 700 Mhz <256megs of RAM, Win98. It was starting to have recurrent errors that we couldn't solve.

Overall the build went smoothly and I had noone standing over my shoulder helping. A great learning experience for me.

[Thermodyne]

Building a system is not that hard. But you need to be good at it if you are building your main rig. There are always unexpected things that pop up. And mistakes can cost money!

[Kamog]

I don't know why, but Compaq computers seem to crash a lot more often then other brands even when they are running the same operating system and the same programs. A couple of my coworkers have Compaqs and they are constantly getting blue screens of death, start-up problems, and crashes. What is it that's different about them?

[Atrocities]

Compq, HP, Del, Gateway, IBM, etc - made in Mexico by slave wage employees with parts made in Chine by captive no paid imprissioned slaved labor = cheap computers that often fail within days of their one year warrenty. Gotta love it.

[Thermodyne]

I've got a dell 530 dually workstation that has been going 24/7 for almost 5 years. I had one of the IDE hard drives fail at a litle short of 3 years. But other than that it has been great. I switched it to SCSI 160's a few months ago. The 160's are second tier now and I got 5 36gig 10k drives $175

Buy a cheap system....Get a cheap system. You will seldom get more than you pay for.

[Jack Simth]

You can also go on E-bay and search for misspellings of computer brands/parts; e.g., Compaq: Compack, Kompaq, Kompack. in the appropriet categories. Few people search on misspellings, so those that have them tend not to be bid on. Of course, it's a little bit of a gamble - you don't really know what condition the items are in, or what, precisely, they truly are, but it's an option.

Edit: Ah! Compac is doing pretty decent at the moment.

[ToddT]

Gee i guess my TRS-8 color computer 2 with 64k ram and an external 300bps modem and 16k 51/2 floppy, must be worth more than 1700.