I think I'm ready to buy a cheap (Windows based) computer

In My Humble Opinion
1

Yes, you read that right. Yosemitebabe, the Machead, wants a PC. Well, to be fair, I have always considered myself “cross platform”, with a strong inclination towards Macs. (OS X is fabulous!) Virtual PC is fine for some things, but I like having the “real thing” too.

I am not sure that I’ll buy the PC right now, but I keep lurking on eBay for PCs, so that’s a sign that a PC purchase is looming. This will be a “part time” computer, maybe used 25% of the time, so it needn’t be fancy or super-fast.

I am cheap. I don’t want the latest and greatest. Doesn’t have to be new. $200 - $300 is about it.

I have a fairly functioning PC (AMD 450 MHz) but it has overheating problems and I’d rather not mess with trying to upgrade it or do much with it. It is fragile. Therefore, I think I want 600 or above MHz. I merely want to notice some speed bump over the 450 AMD.

I have an 80 gig IBM hard drive floating around. If I could figure out how to install it without duress (I have been assured that I could learn) then the hard drive is covered.

I’d want at least 256 megs RAM. 512 better. I know me—I love RAM.

I want an Ethernet card. Are they hard to install? Should I look for a PC with Ethernet built in, or could I just add it myself?

I don’t want integrated video. But a cheap video card (16 MB) will do. Same with sound card.

OS—well, it depends. Win 98 is OK, and at least I know its ups and downs. I hear conflicting reports of XP, and if I go with XP, I’ll have to pay money for it, and did I mention? I’m cheap.

I will be using this for large file downloads (BitTorrent, etc.) and light surfing. A little Photoshop and Dreamweaver, but most of that is done on my Mac. No gaming. Don’t care about gaming. Don’t care much for audio (MP3) either. My Mac can handle that.

Any suggestions? I know I’ll probably get used, but what exactly should I look for on eBay, or elsewhere? Anything I should avoid? There are so many options and choices, I don’t know where to start looking.

Thanks in advance!

2

I would go to a local computer shop and have them build a computer to your specifications. DO NOT buy a computer from Ebay, you WILL end up being scammed.

A few suggestions:
CPU: AMD Athlon XP processors have the best bang for the buck. On the Intel side, the Pentium 4-A Processor(called Northwood, you can tell it from the older P4s because it has 512K of cache. You don’t have to know what this means, just look for the words “northwood” or “512k”) has acceptable performance. Avoid the Celeron processor, as they’re extremely slow.

A simple way to do all this is to buy an all-in-one motherboard. nVidia makes a product called the nForce420, it has onboard video, audio, and LAN. I know you said you didn’t want onboard video, but it is of decent quality, and has an AGP slot so you can install a real videocard in the future if need be. The audio is 5.1 surround and of EXTREMELY good quality. It supports AMD Athlon XP processors and DDR memory.

Walk into a computer shop and tell the person standing there “I want you to sell me a good ATX case with a 350Watt AMD-approved power supply and decent cooling, a GOOD QUALITY nVidia nForce420-based motherboard with onboard video, audio, and LAN, two 256MB sticks of PC2100 DDR RAM, and an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processor. I want you to configure the RAM to run in dual-channel mode on that motherboard, and put it all together.”
You can take it home, put in the hard-drive and CD-ROM from your existing computer, and install windows 98. It should be a snap, and should end up costing about $300.

If you have any further questions or need clarifications/explanations, feel free to ask.

3

Oh wow, FDISK! You mean it would all cost about $300? WOW. That sounds great. Thanks. I didn’t know that nForce did a good all-in-one motherboard.

4

Admit it yosemitebabe, you just wanna play with that Speak and Spell emulator don’t ya?

:smiley:

5

Kal: You found me out! :wink:

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yosemitebabe: I can’t vouch for their prices, but the motherboard should be about $75, RAM about $125, CPU about $50, and case about $50. If they want to charge you more, you can easily drop the RAM down to two sticks of 128MB. That should offset any overage.

One note about the RAM: That motherboard uses dual-channel RAM to increase graphics performance. RAM must be installed in pairs to take advantage of this. The downside is that you can’t upgrade RAM without replacing the existing sticks. If graphics performance is less important to you than upgradeability (which, since you don’t game, it probably is) you can disable the dual-channel mode and gain the use of a third memory slot and remove the requirement for installing RAM in pairs. So you could, say, get two 128MB sticks now, and later buy a 256MB stick to bring you up to 512MB.

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yosemitebabe - The most expencive part of a computer is the Monitor.

If you can get one of these then it makes it all the easy.

You should be able to get all you need for $300 - especailly if you do not mind salvaging from the old AMD P>O>S

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Oh and if you haven;t learn from you first mistake - do not buy an AMD (oven) … they all over heat.

If you don’t wanna spend too much get a celeron

9

No they don’t, I leave my Athlon XP 1800+ running 24-7 at 100% load (Seti) and it has never gotten close to overheating. It is even slightly overclocked and I am using a cheap generic heatsink.

10

No computer, properly constructed and properly maintained, will ever overheat. Failure of fans or buildup of dust will cripple any Intel CPU just like it will an AMD.

11

Go to Circuit City. There is a beast there known as the Comapq 6030 you can get for about $ 359.00 ( 399-50 rebate) It is a 1.4 Athlon/ 128 meg DDR RAM / DVD/ 40 gig hard drive built in modem / ethernet/ audio / shared video up to 32 megs / USB / firewire etc etc with XP Home OS . It’s about the most bang for the buck you can get from a name manufacturer. I’ve been using one for about 2 months now and it’s been fine.

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"yosemitebabe - The most expencive part of a computer is the Monitor. "

Check the price of the operating system…

techbargains.com usually has a list of daily dell deals. I got one of those. So cool & they come to your house for a year if you need them to, for free.

13

FDISK has some terrific suggestions, but if you want to go in another direction with this and just try to get more MHz for your buck, you may want to try pricewatch.com. I’ve ordered literally dozens of products through vendors that advertise on Pricewatch and have never been ripped off.

If you go to their site and click the “PC Windows” link under “Systems” heading in the top right corner of the page, you can see that an Athlon XP 2100 system with the bare minimums in terms of other hardware (128MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, cheap motherboard) for $300.

You can always add more RAM or a second hard drive later. As you say you will be using the computer for downloads of large files, it will be useful to have two hard drives. If you’re extracting a compressed file or copying a file from one place to another, it will always be much faster going from one drive to another rather than reading and writing to the same drive at the same time.

Also, if you just want low-end video and sound cards, why not just go for the onboard crap? Save yourself some money. As for the NIC (Ethernet card), don’t let the lack of one onboard be a deal-breaker for you. They are very easy to install, and one can be had for less than $10.

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Errr, top left.

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Our 1.7 AMD had an overheating problem because the guy who built it put in the wrong fan. So we had to pay $300+ to get the hardrive back because it was burnt out and have the fan replaced. The fan now can be heard from any point in the house. Its the loudest computer fan I’ve ever heard. So while it doesn’t burn out now, its the loudest most annoying thing in the house (besides me).
Thats just my personal experience with AMD’s. It was mostly the computer guys fault but that fan is the spawn of satan. I’ll think twice about getting an AMD again because of it.

Anyways, I concure with what has been said. The best thing to do it go to a well known company and tell them exactly what you want. Don’t trust eBay. Its worth spending a little more to know your not getting ripped off. Good luck.

16

Thanks so much, everyone! Now I have some real tangible info I can start looking into.

Should I plan to get the PC before or after Christmas? (If I can afford it at all—I hope I can, but you never know what may come up…) I’m not in a desperate rush to get this, but if prices are going to be better now than later, I may hustle and get something now.

Also, to clear up the details about my current AMD 450 PC—it never overheated before I had it upgraded. I suspect that during the upgrade, something got severed or pushed out of whack, since now the heat alarm goes off a lot. A small freeware app called “CPU Cool” keeps it running OK most of the time, but for some reason Juno, Dreamweaver and a few other apps make it freeze up and overheat (heat alarm beeping off in a most annoying way). So, this PC has limited use; I don’t think it’s worth fixing. I just want to leave it as-is and keep it as a “back up” computer.

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Oh yes, and regarding monitors: yes, I am getting quite picky about monitors. I want to make the transition to all LCD. My G4 Mac has a 17" Mitsubishi LCD, which is well-reviewed and much-loved by me. I want to get a 15" LCD for my PC and older Mac to share between them. Right now I have a 15" CRT monitor which is OK, but only OK.

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Wearia: That’s why I said properly constructed. It’s no harder to build an AMD-based computer than an Intel-based one, but if the person doing the building is incompetent, you’ll have problems either way. If you take your computer into a local shop, you can have a tech install a silent cooler for not too much money.

yosemitebabe: LCD monitors won’t connect to videocards designed for normal VGA monitors. You’ll have to make sure any videocard you buy specifically mentions that it has “DVI” to know that it will be LCD compatible. This rules out the nForce motherboard I originally suggested. Do you happen to have a friend that knows how to assemble PCs? If so, you could buy parts online at a significant savings and have them put it together for you. Alternatively, you could have a local computer shop do it, but you will pay more. You could simply go to the shop and have them design a computer to your specifications. They will try to milk money out of you wherever possible, though.

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FDISK: Yeah, I knew that some LCD montiors are DVI (my G4 has a DVI connector, and I know that montiors like Apple’s Cinema Display are DVI). However, my Mitsubishi LCD monitor is VGA, and connects fine to both my G4’s VGA connection, and to my old AMD 450. As long as I get a similar monitor for the new PC, I’ll be fine!

I might ask for the local shop to construct it for me. I’ll ask around for prices. I am cheap, though, so if I can be brave enough to put together some of it myself, I want to do it. (But the question is, am I brave enough? :wink: )

20

yosemitebabe, I am just curious. Not trying to start platform wars or anything like that. Why are you switching to PC? I am considering switching from PC to Mac myself, and I remember how much you love Macs from your other threads, so I am wondering, why the switch?