I have a friend who is looking for a computer. He has a 200 dollar (there may be 20 dollars or so of wiggle room.)
I’ve been poring over the refurbs at every site imaginable, and the cheapest thing I wouldn’t feel terrible about him using is 289 after tax/shipping.
He doesn’t do anything fancy. He’s even still using dial-up. I have a computer that I could offer him for his 200 dollars that is a 9xx Mhz AMD from… too long ago, and he’s willing to buy it. I just think that he could do better for his money.
Or maybe if you could recommend some parts for me to put together for his 200 dollars? The problem is the OS… he’s still running Windows 95, and I don’t just happen to have a copy of WinXP laying around. (Well, I have two, but they’re miiiiiine.)
Check newspaper classified ads, Craigslist, and eBay. Huge number of good used computers available, and for his purposes most would work fine. Some will have XP, but if not, he can do what he wants with a Win98SE box.
You can definetely get something. I built my computer for $400 and it is pretty good but $200 is getting at the extreme low-end for a newer machine.
Some retailers have toyed with $200 computers as Linux boxes. I even think Wal-Mart sold them or sells them. Part of the cost cut is getting rid of Windows but you could probably put XP on them if you wanted to. I googled and they do exist but I couldn’t figure out the best way to locate stores that sell them.
Some large companies around here throw disturbingly new computers in dumpsters and they are free if you know where to find them. I got hired for a short-term consulting job to put all the software and settings on a group of them that got thrown away and they were nice Pentium 4’s that couldn’t have been more than 18 months old.
OTOH, you always find people in the want ads that are trying to sell 10 year old 486’s for 75% of their original purchase price. It is a matter of some luck and buyer beware.
I third the ideas of either a used PC from the classifieds, or a large company-throwaway.
If you work for a company large enough to have it’s own IT department (or know where they dump their trash), there’s a good chance you can get your hands on some old-but-still-useable hardware for free. The last place I worked had a silent-auction type thing every few months at a company gathering. Not free (especially since many of my co-workers were programmers too), but still quite cheap.
Alternately, the classifieds in your city probably has a large range of stuff available, though as Shagnasty mentions you have to watch out for people who think the depreciation rate on their PC is in the single digits/year.
Just recently I had a client call me with an old Dell optiplex 266Mhz 128M of ram and a 40MB hard drive with Win95 that he just paid $150 for and was thrilled till he found out that his DSL equipment wouldn’t work with it and he was either going to need a router or an OS upgrade, either of which would cost him as much or more than he paid for the machine by the time I hooked it up for him (sine he was lost as to how to go about it himself). I gave him a flyer where he could buy a brand new dell that would easily work with his DSL self install as well as being literally 100 times better machine, with a warranty. He looked like he wanted to cry.
Oh well, I didn’t charge him for the consult since that prolly would have just added to his misery even more.
No I can’t upgrade you to XP for labor alone, no not even 98se, sorry.
Have you thought about taking his $200 and building up your AMD box for him? You can max out the RAM and maybe even get the best processor the mobo supports, and if money left over, upgrade the OS. I’ve done this a lot for people by using my old machines or throwaway machines. You can get a LOT done with $200 and most of a computer.
What are the specifications of the machine you have?
Ouch. That had better have come with one great monitor. That’s a rip-off even in Canadian $$$. I’m waffling with my K6-2 500 as to selling it for 40 or 60$.
But you can’t discount the chance of geting a fantastic discarded corporate computer. I have (under duress) personally landfilled working PIIIs rather than being able to donate them due to security/liability concerns.
If your friend has a working monitor and USB peripherals, he might consider a used G4 PowerMac or even a Blue and White G3 PowerMac.
If your friend has a credit card and the time to wait for rebates, he can get a decent e-machine for about $200. My laptop crashed recently (totally dead) and I’m strapped for cash at the moment, but have reason to believe I’ll be in a better position in a few months, so to tide me over I bought an e-machine package at Best Buy (1400 GHz processor, 160 MB disk, 512 SyncDram, etc.) for $259 after rebates. (It included a monitor and printer, neither of which I particularly needed but it was cheaper to get them with mon/printer than without due to the combo rebates.) While e-machines are closer to the Dodge Neon than to the BMW of computers, a Dodge Neon is a whole lot better than no car at all.
Checking Newegg, you could pick up a refurb Athlon XP 2800+ & PC Chips Sis Sis 741 GX mobo combo for $67, 512MB DDR Ram for $35, 40 GB HD for $45, and cheap case with power supply for $40. -Total price $187, toss used CDROM from local computer place (should be cheap) and Linux, and you should have pretty usable machine.
Check your local area for places that recycle. In Portland we have Free Geek, where you can get a computer free in exchange for work. Alternately, HQPC is a local recycler which gets job lots of crapped out computers, busts them down for parts and tests and sells them cheap. We’ve been putting together cheap ass systems for friends from this place and it’s amazing what you can scrounge. Mobos that’ll take CPUs up to a gig run 15-25 bucks, socket PIIIs 800Mhz run about 15 bucks, HDs are a buck a gig, ATX cases are five bucks without power supply, ten with. RAM is 14 bucks for 128MB, 25 for 256MB. We pick up PCI TV capture cards for ten bucks, sound cards for five, 4x AGP card for five - fifteen depending on how much memory they have, CD RW 32x+ ten bucks, floppy drive for a dollar, mouse and keyboard you can get brand new for 25–you get the idea.
With prices like this, you can see it’s pretty easy to build a cheap ass system that will do the job–heck, for a basic browser/email box a 400Mhz CPU is more than adequate if you get a bunch of memory stuck in it.
With brand new, fairly hot shit Turion laptops with 15.4 inch displays, DVD combo drive, 40GB HDs, 256 MB (128 mapped to video) and Radeon Mobile X-30 video going for 600.00 brand new from Fry’s there’s no excuse to get ripped off on a cheap used 'puter.