For example, my Dell Dimension I bought in early 2001: I’m going on six years with it now. Other than upgrading from Win ME to XP and a swap of the soundcard, I’ve been more than happy with it. It runs very smooth, never crashes (knock on wood) and I’ve never needed a call for service. I can easily run Dreamweaver 3, Excel 2003, Outlook 2003, Photoshop, Access, Soulseek, and iTunes at the same time, with almost no slow down. I guess I did add 256 of RAM (for 512 total) just for the hell of it.
At the time of purchase, with the 19 inch monitor, it was $1700. At 22 years old, $1700 was a TON of money, but now, I consider how much I’ve learned and changed in that time, and figure that $1700 is almost nothing. Definitely worth every penny.
So, anybody else, good or bad? Eventually, I’m going to need something new, and am torn between anther Dell or an iMac G5…
I built my computer 18 months ago. I had some time on my hands so I made myself a contest to build the best computer I could for less than $400. I scoured every bargain site I could for a week and ended up with an Athlon 2800, a SOYO Dragon motherboard, 160 GB hard drive, 512 MB Ram, and a GeForce 5500 video card as well as a cheap but cool case. I had the other parts.
I put it all together and it has worked well ever since. I didn’t spend much so I suppose it would be hard not to be worth it.
I work in IT but I would never spend more than say $700 on a desktop but I would get every pennies worth out of it and make it better than those that cost much more.
I just got it a month ago. I think it was about $1300 with the 19" NEC LED monitor & an Epson color inkjet printer (the PC is an HP Pavillion). I’m happy with it so far.
Right – I think what I meant to say was ‘going on it’s sixth year’
Shagnasty, yeah, going forward, another option is to build my own… I probably should have clarified in my OP those with non-self-built PC’s.
Either way, since it would be my first time building my own (if I went that route), and granted I know the experience would be rewarding, would you recommend scrapping together a ‘practice’ PC with old almost worthless parts first, which would cost almost nothing, or just go all out the first time and go for the best I can (for the price)?
Right – I think what I meant to say was ‘going on its sixth year’
Shagnasty, yeah, going forward, another option is to build my own… I probably should have clarified in my OP those with non-self-built PC’s.
Either way, since it would be my first time building my own (if I went that route), and granted I know the experience would be rewarding, would you recommend scrapping together a ‘practice’ PC with old almost worthless parts first, which would cost almost nothing, or just go all out the first time and go for the best I can (for the price)?
There isn’t much risk in building your own computer from a hardware standpoint although it can be frustrating (or maybe not). A careful person isn’t going to physically break parts and it is almost impossible to hook up things in a way that will break them. They may not work the first time but working through that is part of the fun.
I would just build the one you want the first time. Putting one together can take hours to days (if something really hard to troubleshoot goes wrong) but you will learn either way. If you are careful and try to learn, there is little chance you won’t end up with a working computer you built yourself.
If you decide to do that, there is just a short list of tips that we can give you here (like making sure you mount the motherboard on risers instead of straight to the case.) Just ask here before you do.
You will need to define the computer you want before hand and work towards a goal instead of slapping a random assortment of parts together but that is part of the fun too.
After my last computer out-lived its upgradablity, I thought long and hard about which would be more beneficial: spending a lot on a computer I thought would last four years (which is what I did the last time around, and it did) or spend much less with the knowledge that I’d probably buy a new one in another couple of years. I decided to go for the cheaper computer.
So my current computer was just over $600, and I’ve spent another $300 on upgrading it. second hard drive, more ram, a dvd burner, better video card etc. It’s almost a year and a half old, and the newer computers on the market now aren’t that much better. If I wanted a new computer that had specs that exceed this one, I’d be spending hundreds more on it. The weird thing is that the processors on brand new computers aren’t leaving this one’s in the dust - they’re not a whole lot faster than this amd 2800+; I really thought they would be by now.
My current system is two weeks old. This is because I decided that, for once, I was going to upgrade living hell out of it so I could have something that will last me for a few years yet without any significant need to upgrade again. It cost me over $3,000 to do, but I’m very happy with it and I know that it is eminently capable of handling anything I would care to throw at it for the forseeable future.
I’m a bit of a power user though. Gaming, art, music, web design, along with the usual web surfing et al, so I consider the price of admission very well worth it, especially since I know I won’t have to sink much of anything more into it for a long time yet.
There really hasn’t been that much advance in programs to take advantage of faster processors in the last few years. My Athlon 2400 runs at the same discernable speed as my mum’s new 3ghz P4, and the only upgrade I’ve made speedwise since I bought it about 3 years ago was upgrading to a gig of RAM.
My current computer is about a year and a half old. It was a barebones system that came with P4 2.4 GHz CPU and 512 MB DDRAM, and cost $350. The second-last remnant of the original computer that it used to be, the 8-gig HD from a 1994 HP Pavilion, was retired in November, and replaced with a Western Digital 40 gig drive, to complement the Maxtor 40 gig drive already in it. The only thing left from the HP is the floppy drive. It got a new sound card around the same time as the HD. On Tuesday, I put a new 16x double-layer DVD writer in it to replace the previous drive that started going bad recently. The video and ethernet cards are about 3 years old. Works like a charm.
I’d have to say it has been worth every penny, and that I will never, ever buy a $1500 Sony VAIO P1 266 with 32 MB RAM and 4 gig HD, or anything like it, ever again, that becomes instantly obsolete. My wife had been using it since December 1998, and it could not be upgraded at this late stage of the game. The MB wouldn’t see a 40 gig drive. They don’t make the RAM for it anymore. It was a P1 266, fercryinoutloud! It lives in the landfill now, because I bought another barebones for my wife from the same place as the other one, that came with Athlon 2.4 GHz, 512 MB DRAM, 60 gig SATA HD and a DVD-ROM for $325.
I have three computers: a 266mHz P2, a 850mHz P3, and an Athlon 1800+. The first one was free, the second was 50, and I upgraded the thrid so many times since I bought it--only the CPU is original--that I have no idea who much is in it now.
My current computer has been in my possession about 3 weeks now. Which makes it largely irrelevant to your concerns here, but its predecessor…
Up until 3 weeks ago I was using a “WallStreet” G3 Series '98 PowerBook. That makes it a 7+ year old model. It still works very nicely and will run the latest MacOS X (albeit only with installation help from a kludge called XPostFacto), and it was also quite upgradeable for a laptop: G3/300 —> G4/500, 128 MB RAM —> 512 MB RAM, 8 GB ATA HD —> dual 60 GB HDs, plus assorted external accoutrements that came along after it was manufactured.
It was worth every penny. If my new PowerBook (17" G4) serves me as primary machine for as long, I’ll be making my next computer purchase in late 2012, if that puts it into perspective.
Home-built 2.8 GHz P4 here. Ignoring the LCD monitor that I already had, it cost about $800.
Still going well after two and a half years, with no immediate plans to change anything. I don’t upgrade by bits and pieces every few months - everything that’s in it has been there from the beginning.
Maybe once Windows Vista is out and applications are out that will make use of more power/multiple processors, I’ll replace it.
Just got a new Mac a few months ago, after the Mac I had since '96 finally bought the farm. I swear, the minute I walked out of the store with it, they must’ve yelled “OK, HE’S GONE! ROLL OUT THE INTELS!”
Since then, I’ve upgraded pretty much as far as my PII mobo allows. All told, I probably spent about $1000 (CDN) on the hardware.
I think I got my money’s worth. I got twice as much use out of it as I did out of the 486 I had before it, and paid a fraction of the price. I could easily have spent three or four times as much for the same stuff, if I bought it all at once, assembled. (Never mind that a burner wasn’t an option at the time.)
Long overdue for an upgrade. (Haven’t bothered looking at new games for a few years now, and video encoding takes just a bit longer than is reasonable. Other than that, it gets the job done.)
In the next couple of months, I’ll probably spend half as much putting together a P4 system with ten times the clock speed and twice the HD space – and then run it into the ground until I get the same “You’re still using a what?” looks from people about it.
Hm, I have a compaq bought from the navy exchange back in 97, still chugging along, being used as an email and internet box for pretty much anybody who needs to go online. Never modified and exceedingly stable. Never crashed, still running the original software package of windows 95 and whatever else compaq loaded it with=)
Next is my laptop, a HP pavillion that I bought from the online HP store in 2002, is chugging along fine except for the small incedent of the roomies cat pissing in it. Screen is trashed out but we have it hooked up to an old monitor. It has issues right now, refusing to recognize any form of keyboard so it is about to get dissassembled and checked out as my brother wants an email and cd/dvd burning computer [he has an external dvd burner from sony, and the hp has an internal dvd player/cd recorder in it.] It was a very good outlay of money, and i dont regret spending the $1500 for it.
our 3d computer is the bastardized descendant of a box I had made for me in 1995. The case is the only thing that is original, everything else has been replaced over the years. Oh, the 3.25 drive is original, as is the ancient cd drive. Somewhere in the house I have the original HDD. It still has windows 3.1, netscape 2 and an ancient version of norton on it=) and i think the game loaded into the hdd is eye of the beholder 1.
I have 2 amigas, a 1000 and a 500, with the add on hdd for the 500. They both still work and the only reason I changed over to PC was to get online, and they pretty much stopped supporting the amiga and it became impossible to get new games and programs=(
I just built a new computer using a barebones soyo that i got for christmas in 2004, and the money from christmas 2005. I will probably be building my own computers from now on, it is sort of fun [despite a bit of a problem with the HDD i bought, but we got that solved] though I do want to get a new laptop for traveling.
Mine cost about $1400 2 and a bit years ago. My father just bought a bigger and better one for $700 but I don’t begrudge one penny that I spent on mine. I also can’t see any reason to upgrade it, most business apps run better on it than the network at work and who can ever complain about broadband net access?
Mine is about 8 years old I think. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it runs ME, which I hate. The computer itself has been problem-free. My husband bought it for me, and I think he paid around $1200 for it.
