[rescue] Looking to rescue a PC

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 11:56:13AM -0600, Scott Newell wrote:
>Where do you think the best bang for the buck is right now?  I'm needing to
>step up from my ancient dual P3-450 box to something a little faster and XP
>capable.  It appears I can get an old P4 2.something, 1GB, XP COA, and a
>small drive for ~$100 shipped.  (For instance,
>http://www.surpluscomputers.com/348987/dell-gx-p4-2.2ghz-tower.html).
>
>I don't have a good feel for current used pricing...is this on the high
>side?  Would I be better off spending $200 for something more modern?  (I
>probably should spend $1k and build up something nice that will last me
>another 9-10 years, but I'm just not in the mood to do all the research
>right now.)
>
>Don't need much: one or two free PCI slots, a parallel port, one or two
>serial ports, analog VGA.  Audio would be nice.  Fairly quiet, too.
>(Nothing like an Octane!)
>
>If anyone has anything suitable they're looking to get rid of, let me know.
> I'm in the southern US.

Here you can buy a no name pc from a relatively well thought of local
company for about $250 (including VAT) which is a microatx board, case
and power supply.

It includes no optical or floppy drive, but it has an IDE port, 2 SATA ports,
1g RAM, 10/100 lan, 320gb hard drive (SATA) dual core ATOM processor (1.6gHz 
each), sound, low level graphics (analog VGA), audio etc.

Brand new with a one year warranty. Some places sell them with a 2 or 3 
year warranty.

I expect that if you look around you can get it for less than $200 in the US.

If you go up to $300 here, you can get a dual core regular CPU, 2g RAM,
optical drive (20x DVD dual layer writer), 10/100/1000 LAN and so on.

My guess is that they go for less than $250 in the US. 

IMHO you are buying someone else's headache if you buy the old system. 

In order to get computers that age working, they probably need cleaning and
oiling of the cpu and power supply fan, dusting out the CPU heatsink, and
may have problem capacitors. 

For $100 shipped, I doubt they have even opened the cases, let alone checked
them out. 

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation. 
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.