I want a dual boot machine, with Linux and Windows. I have a copy of Windows XP Pro and Service Pack 2, which I will install for my kids to play their games on, and work on school video projects. I am thinking of installing Sun’s desktop environment for the Linux side, and letting that be my internet connection and my machine. So, I don’t want to spend $100 extra for a machine with an operating system pre-installed.
The problem? I have 5 kids and not much money. I was all set to buy a Cyber Power Athlon 64 machine, but then I looked at epinions, and they seem to have earned their abysmal opinions with DOA machines and poor tech support. TigerDirect doesn’t sell what I want, and Aberdeen seems to be a bit pricey.
Does anyone have experience with Cyber Power? Are they really that bad? Is there another maker of good, no operating system machines out there?
I don’t know if you would consider this but you could buy a “barebones” system. Barebones means that you get the case, power supply, CPU, and motherboard installed. You just add a hard drive(s), CD/DVD rom drive, and RAM. These tend to be very economical and there are lots of different builders with lots of options.
If you really know what you want then that might be the way to go. Installing the additional components yourself is pretty easy and should only take a few minutes apiece. That would let you get exactly what you want for a great price. If you do this, make sure that the motherboard is reputable. The CPU is only made by one company but there are some pretty bad and unreliable motherboard makers out there. Stick with one of the moajor brands.
Ebay always has tons of barebones systems listings if you just want to peek.
The Aberdeen and Tiger Direct machines I was considering are bare bones machines. Suprisingly, building your own doesn’t seem to save much, even with the discounts that an “almost manufacturer” brings, but I am definitely comfortable doing it. (Several of my coworkers have built their own machines, so I know where to get help if I need it. (I work for a programming shop. We geeks are rampant here.)
I haven’t tried eBay. I’m not especially familiar with motherboard manufacturers, nor with RAM. My coworkers are more so than me, but their are limits to the time I can ask of them. (The downside of being their boss…)
I’ve been afraid of eBay for computers, since a few friends got badly burnt there.
Just a suggestion, but buy a machine with two disks and use one for Windows and the other for Linux. Keep the two utterly seperate. I thoroughly recommend the barebones Shuttle typew machines, but you’ll have to make sure that they’re fully supported by Linux.
I’ve bought two barebones systems now. All it requires is to transfer your existing floppy, hard and CD/DVD drives into the case and plug them in, then run the motherboard setup disk with the drivers, etc. If it is permitted to recommend a company, have a browse on this website. They assemble the system, test it and ship it to you inside a week. Very powerful computers are very affordable. To get what I have now in a package system by a major manufacturer would have cost me at least a thousand dollars more than I spent.
I do not work for the company, but I’m a satisfied customer.
You’re looking at things from the wrong end of the telescope if you’re thinking that you’re going to save a bunch of money (except on a barebones) by already having the XP OS. You’re not. The cost of a manuf to include the XP OS pre-installed is not anywhere near the same as your cost to purchase at retail.
Your best bet re bang for the buck is a name brand Circuit City deal (with rebate) special or a refurb with OS from a reputable place like Computer Geeks.
As an example this unit has everything you need re your specs and the Presario 6000 series have been very reliable machines.
As a side note if I were in the market for a good 17 inch monitor and watching my expenses carefully I would hit the thrifts. Many excellent, newish 17 inch CRTs are being dumped by people getting flat screen panel monitors, and these are often available for only $ 10 or so. You should try to test them before you take the out of the store. I do not recommend shopping for PCs at thrifts as the deals are much less compelling and the risks higher.
As for the Linux side of the question, JDS is good, pretty and solid but a lot has been stripped out to make it easily supportable by Sun’s service organization.
For business, it is great. But when you want to add the little toys on (like Opera, games, DVD), your run into missign libraries. KDE is not included with JDS, so there are a lot of missing libraries. Once I added KDE, many of the problems adding extra software went away.
I think JDS is wonderful for a business environment where employees do not have the luxury or permission of adding programs to their desktops, but it’s a special kind of dependency hell for those who do have permission.
If you do go with JDS, though, remember that it is a modified distribution of SuSE. Most packages tailored to SuSE will work with JDS. This will save you some dependency pain.
Also, if you dual-boot Linux and Windows XP, be careful if you use the GRUB loader (like Red Hat does) and the 2.6 kernel (newer distributions). Lilo doesn’t give the problem. It seems the GRUB folk discovered a flaw in the way disk blocks/size/partitions (one of those) are recorded, so they went ahead and fixed the method. Windows XP does not. So if you add GRUB after Windows XP, Windows XP may not boot. This isn’t a bug. This is the GRUB folks counting correctly and not coding to a, usually, harmless bug in Windows.
Again, Lilo not a problem, and there are answers/workarounds for GRUB.
With the CPU, all you have to worry about is clock speed. That is up to you.
Samsung RAM is good but I don’t know about many others. Stay away from cheap off-brand RAM. 512mb is the minimum recommended standard for Windows XP these days. 1 Gb is better.
Circuit City and Best buy have good specials on hard drives. I saw a 160 gb drive on sale at Best Buy last week for $80. Any other the major brands should be OK. I don’t know that you do need two hard drives. Two partitions on one drive will do the same thing.
I have never heard of much difference in CD or DVD rom readers or burners. Speed seems to be the only major difference between them.
Some people have had bad luck with cheap power supplies.
You may need a video card but you will have to tell us if we need to get into that. It is more complex than other components.
I was thinking of a barebones. However, you are right. The prices offered at the large chains are unbelievably low. I was figuring that by already having XP, I save just under $100. By already having Office, I save a few hundred, and don’t have to worry about MS Works or something already being there.
Thanks for the links, everyone. I’m going to spend some time poking around. Looking at Computer Geeks is making me realize that computers are almost throw away items. I’m spending $350 signing my kids up for swim team, so I thought I’d go a little pricier, so I won’t want to replace it in a year. Now, I’m not so sure.
FYI, I’m looking in the $700-$800 range. I have a nice monitor. One thing that is important is usb2 or firewire, so that my kids can do their projects at our house. They have some talented friends, and always work on these video projects at their friends’ homes. (The fact that I’m getting too old to bend around to the back of my PC to plug in the digital camera is irrelevant!)
Slightly off-topic…but was this the case with Mandrake 10? I had huge problems with it destroying XP setups, beyond the XP revoery console’s ability. It’d be nice to know what made me abandon Mandrake…
In my experience, 512MB is essential for anybody doing anything taxing. But many people just want to run Word and IE, and XP does that happily with 128MB. As with every other resource, it depends on what you use it for. My video cards are puny 32MB things, but then all they do is display basic information, with their 3D capabilities completely dormant.
This is a tutorial that walks you through installing a dual boot on two separate hard drives. It is specifically for Suse, but it worked for me with Redhat 9, the only difference here being how the bootloader is set up.
The nice thing about doing a dual boot this way is that Windows and Linux are completley separate. So if in the future, you buy another computer, you simply pull out whichever hard drive you want, put it in the new machine, and you are all set.
Multi-Wave sells barebone systems that you can configure the way you would like. They always had a good reputation and good choices for motherboards and CPU’s. It might be worth a look. Link
Monarch Computer has a pretty good reputation. They have a pretty good special out front - an nice Athlon 64 machine for $550, though all it has is integrated video, so for gaming you would have to get a real video card. If you add on a video card & DVD drive, they will give you a free copy of the game Far Cry too. If for example you added in a Sapphire Radeon 9600XT & a basic DVD-Rom, the cost would be $744.
Thank you! This is a very explicit! (I set up a dual boot about 6 years back, using Boot Magic, but I knew XP had some peculiarities that are worth noting.)
