I currently own The Ugliest Computer in the World. The monitor came from my old rig , and the new tower was an aborted casemod by the former owner. He spraypainted it black and silver, but did a very bad job of it. You can see fingerprints and drip marks all over the thing. To top it all off, he tried to cut a hole in the side to install a new fan, but his Dremel bit wore out; and there’s a nice weird silver circle in the black paint to show for it.
I paid $200 for it, and a $150 video card later it can play UT2004. Not a bad deal, and the ugly sucker’s grown on me.
My main computer was custom built by a local shop. I have another from eMachines that I got at Best Buy for a few hundred dollars; it gets the job done.
I built this $1000 game box from stuff bought at Fry’s and a few salvaged parts. It plays like a dream- it only took an evening to put together, worked great from the beginning, and nothing beats being able to play any game I want with all the options turned all the way up (for a few more months, at least).
We’ve also got a Mac from the local college bookstore and a broken thinkpad that was bought of ebay and which I aquired by trading an ancient machine made of computer-show bought parts and old hand-me-downs.
I have a Gateway with a big fat heavy EV 700 monitor; I bought it five years ago. It came bundled with a printer which I have since replaced with a far better printer/scanner/copier. I also replaced the mouse with a Logitech cordless optical.
My previous comp. was a cannibalized crotchety thing that my cousin the computer guy had assembled as a birthday present. I used it as long as I could, and then it up n’ died.
Dell Dimension 8250; bought it a few years ago. I’ve been very happy with it. Works great; does what I need it to do; no problems at all.
I earnestly read up on building a custom computer, toying with the idea as a learning opportunity. The the light dawned: I just plain didn’t care that much. I use a computer as a basic tool, with a few fun frilly things occassionally, but I still spend way too much time on it already. It’s a tool and a pasttime for me, nothing more. So I opted for convenience.
I’ve always bought my computers from a local store. I strongly believe in the power of being able to return/exchange/criticize if something goes wrong.
Local compu guy working out of a pole barn sold me a Dell 2400 factory refurb. After adding a DVD burner, I still haven’t spent $700, and can let it run for days without a crash or restart (buh-bye Win98)
I walked through Fry’s and grabbed a bunch of stuff off the shelves, then went home and threw it in a box. I could have shopped around and saved money, but I like building stuff, not shopping.
Mine is home built, my brother has a computer sideline as such I can get OEM parts at wholesale prices ($800(au) for a Radeon X800 pro instead of $1200(au)).
I source the cheapest and get it, upgrade every 18months or so and sell the spares to our company so our office has reasonably good systems
Current machine is an Alienware box. Dangerosa’s is an HP somethingorother I picked up at Best Buy when her old machine (also an Alienware) took a dirt nap following an electrical storm. My previous machine was built for me by GamePC, and before that we had a Dell or two.
I’m about to build a new system, though, so the lineup changes.
I built my computer myself, with supervision and some guidance so I didn’t fork it up. It has three hard-drives for my super-redundant backup needs, including a monster 250GB drive. It has a DVD reader, and a multi-format DVD/CD-RW burner drive for backup also, as well as a fan controller with blue LED dials for its four internal fans (3 x 80mm drawing air in at the back, side door, and in front of the hard drives, and 1 x 92mm pulling air out the top.) I run the fans at low speed but it stays nice and cool - had problems with the previous machine overheating because it had so much stuff crammed in it. The new one still has two free 5.25" drive bays, one of which I want to install a temperature monitor and stuff in.
The tower I picked out has two front USB ports and a window in the side (the tower itself is black, with silver trim and gold fan grills over black aluminum air filters). The fans have orange LED lights in them, and the top fan has ultraviolet LEDs that make the orange fluorescent plastic glow. I sleeved the internal cables with black tubing. The processor is an AMD Athlon and runs around 1.8GHz with 512 ram on the motherboard and expandable to 3x that. I think I am going to wait to upgrade the ram though when I get a new MB and processor (probably next summer.)
I couldn’t tell you what my video/sound cards are, but they’re both pretty new - a friend of mine put them in there for me when he upgraded his. All of my parts that were not secondhand were purchased either at Fry’s Electronics or online on NewEgg.com.
I use a black and grey Fellowes split-ergonomic keyboard I got from Dell, software setting to the Dvorak layout. Logitech optical mouse and Logitech USB microphone. My monitor is a flat-screen (not a flat panel though) NEC.
My computer’s name is Enoch I. He’s not quite “finished” yet, though, so I don’t have pics of him, sorry. My livelihood depends on my computer so I take it pretty seriously… plus if you assemble the machine yourself, not only is it easy to upgrade, but you usually get a better value for your $$ because you buy better parts than what the big box prefabs typically use, IMO.
I would never use a computer that I didn’t build myself. Most of the parts on my current machine - P4-3.06GHz, 1GB RAM, around 460GB of drive space on various drives - came from a local OEM distributor and was a bonus from my old boss for a huge project we completed on time and under budget. Some parts - such as the DVD burner - came from Newegg.
My main file server\Domain Controller\Exchange box is running Windows 2003 Server with Exchange 2003 on a dual Celeron 466 box with 512MB of RAM (don’t laugh, aside from slow startups and shutdowns, it’s as responsive as any other server I’ve used). I lived in Atlanta when I built that box, and all of the parts came from local “screwdriver shops”. FWIW, back then you could buy 2 466 Celeron processors for a fraction of what a 900MHz P3 would cost, and it’s as fast as…
My GF’s computer, which is a P3-933, and was also originally built from parts gathered from the same Atlanta “screwdriver shops”. Before the P4, this was my “everyday” box and many of its parts are now in my P4 and I’ve added a 802.11g wireless Microsoft PCI card to her box. I got the PCI card and a 802.11g router from Amazon for $47 shipped after MS annouced that it was leaving the broadband hardware business.
For fans of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series of books, my computers are named (in the order listed above) SHARPE, HARPER and GRACE and the domain is SOUTHESSEX.LOCAL.
Mines an off the rack HP Pavilion from Office Max. Spent twenty minutes there while the guy that was helping me figured out what he had to do to order the friggin thing. Meanwhile about ten little office max drones came by to see if I needed any help with anything. Some of them came by twice. :rolleyes:
The current machine is an old Pentium II (remember those?), with a sprinkling of RAM and a hard drive that appears to share the same capacity as the chip in the microwave.
Prior to this though, I was part owner of two Voodoo PCs, a Hypersonic laptop, one Dell desktop, an extremely hardworking HP Pavillion and a Sony Vaio laptop, the latter of which I retained after the divorce.
And that Sony doesn’t work.
(I’m in the market for a new computer, incidentally - my budget is Walmart-level prices, and I’m open to any suggestions, really)
I get my desktops custom built by a local shop and I get my laptops custom built through Best Buy (I also get the warranty). My last laptop needed a new battery (covered) and then it stopped charging altogether so they replaced it. They even sent me the hard drive (at my request) which I then converted to an external USB-2 drive. No files lost.
Regardless of the computer I always try to get the maximum amount of memory on a single chip as well as the most powerful battery offered. Since laptops only come with 1 spare memory slot I ordered the new one with a single gigabyte chip so I can upgrade to 2 gigabytes. One of the nice features on my new laptop is that it will work on house current without the battery installed so if the battery absolutely dies it will still work. It also came with blue tooth so I can link up with anyone who has WIFI.
Well, Dell almost always has a special on their low-end Dimension desktops for around $499 after rebate, with the occasional free shipping offered as well. These machines ain’t great for gaming or doing AutoCAD, but for most everyday tasks - surfing the Internet, getting email, listening to music - they’ll do just fine. Over time, you can upgrade it (you’ll almost certainly want some additional RAM as soon as it’s convenient), but it’s far better than what you’re using today.
I like to recommend local “screwdriver shops” whenever I can, but not knowing where you live I can’t really do that. By buying locally, you can play with a system before buying it, have local support if something breaks and also get a warm fuzzy for helping out the little guy. However, some local shops sell complete crap and others sell decent stuff. Like finding a reliable mechanic, it requires asking around.
Well, Walmart does have some pretty cheap machines - online they have - $200 box, though that is a Linux box, and a bit low on RAM. $450will net you a pretty decent HP machine, with a 17" CRT. And if anything goes wrong, Walmart is usually pretty easy to return things too.
My G4 I bought totally tricked out from apple.com. It’s not such a fancy computer now (funny what five years will do to a computer) but it still runs photoshop and Safari so I’m happy.
Our PC was a Best Buy special from when we worked there. Runs all the games we want to play just fine.
My new PC will probably be direct ordered from HP.
I built mine, using a few of the parts from my previous machine, but mostly new stuff. I got most of my hardware from newegg.com. I’m currently running to the end of the line on the motherboard and processor for this machine (I pretty much constantly upgrade, so my HDs, optical drives and video card a fine now). I’m going to pick up an Athlon 64 3000+ and overclock the crap out of it here in about a month or so. After that upgrade, I’ll have:
Athlon 64 3000+ (at probably 3500+ speeds at least)
1GB Corsair DDR-400 RAM (twin sticks in dual channel mode)
300 GB of HD space (1x20GB, 1x80GB, 1x200GB…already in my current machine)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB (probably will last me about another 4-6 months before I upgrade this again)
16x DVD-ROM
Lite-ON 40x CD-RW
NEC 8x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer
etc, etc.
