Low end desktop for EE tasks?

Are you up for building your own? You can get a mobo, cpu, memory, hard drive, and perhaps a new power supply and, maybe, stick it in the old case. You may need a new video card since AGP mobos are hard to find for the modern flavors. If you need a new video board, get a dual monitor version. Nice to have data sheets open on the secondary monitor and CAD on the primary monitor. Mailorder from newegg.com. The dual-core cpus are the way to go if you have programs that can use the multiple cores.

Mark

"Joerg" skrev i en meddelelse news:XSaKi.389$ snipped-for-privacy@nlpi061.nbdc.sbc.com...

I.M.O. Dell and Compaq are utter thrash! For USD 500 you should be able to get a generic PC with Athlon 64X2 (dual), 1 GB RAM, 500 GB disk and a decent graphics card.

I would do that. However, this machine is about 10 years old so not much can be used anymore. By the time you have pieced all the parts together and bought the required OS/SW licenses you are often already way above the price of one of those bargain systems. I mean, $350 including the OS and some office SW is tough to beat and at least for me such PCs always worked right out of the box.

I haven't heard you groaning about the processing power of what you have. I *have* witnessed your environmental-impact awareness. If the *drive* is what concerns you, why not clone it and replace just that? Less scrap hardware and no new unknowns on drivers / OS compatability problems.

Can't say that. My old Compaq laptop lasted 1/2 million airline miles, then the frame began to crack. Some rather tough flight situations had accelerated that. Six (!) hours on one charge, none of the other manufacturers came even close. It impressed the heck out of guys next to me on flights when their fancy ThinkPads quite after a 2-3 hours.

The two Dell laptops here purr like kittens since years, no complaints. One has been worn down so much that you can see a valley in the touch pad and some letters on the keyboard are nearly gone. Still going. I get a lot of mileage out of my PCs.

With XP? Where?

Joerg hath wroth:

Would you consider buying used hardware? I've been using Dell Optiplex SX260 desktops for most everything. Not the fastest on the planet, but the price is right. About $220 to $270 with XP Home, delivered on eBay. Add about $80 to bring it up to 1.5GBytes RAM. I use one for antenna modeling (4NEC2 etc), RF calcs, and some schematic/PCB work (PCB123, CadSoft Eagle, etc). Not great, but good enough. My box is a 2.6GHz P4 (which is not the fastest), has shared memory video (which is not the fastest), and uses a laptop 40GB hard disk (which is not the fastest). However, despite having two fans in the base, it makes almost no noise. Gigabit ethernet NAS and 6ea USB

Docs:

No, that's fine. But the mobo can take enough RAM, it's really old. Pentium II for those who remember. Then were was the occasional bzzzt ... pop. Spells trouble ahead.

Yeah, that is one reason why I hung onto it for 10 years ;-)

It's not the drive (that will be re-used BTW), it is the whole mobo falling apart and not being powerful enough. And the power supply that has hissed at me. Can't drive anything USB. And ...

Hmm, the first desktop I've seen that has an external power brick. Interesting. yes, I've considered used. But with that extra RAM it's almost as much as a new desktop and that one I don't have to scrub ;-)

There's Craigslist, too - a little less risky than eBay.

Joerg, try this search:

Regards,

Michael

And a crash every hour. There is a reason why Dell and Compaq are more expensive: quality! At work they bought 5 Acer PC's (against my recommendation). It took 3/4 day (average) for each machine to get it up and running and Acer had to come over 4 times to fix 2 machines.

A properly assembled system, with silver thermal paste on the CPU, should have no problems.

I bought an HP (Compaq now?) several years ago, and was disappointed there was no AGP slot, even. In comes an Asus P4S800-MX board. With Arctic Silver Thermal Paste, it was even stable with overclocking.

Got Asus? ;-)

Michael

Have Fry's build you one to your spec.

Cheers! Rich

Oh no, definitely not. Seen too much DOA stuff.

Dell gets dissed a lot but I must say that I never had a failure in the more than five years I use Dell PCs. Not one. Not even a burp.

Well yeah, I can get a Pentium II with 96MB RAM for $75 right here in Cameron Park. That's what I've got right now and I don't need another one of those ;-)

I wonder how he crammed XP into that old thing. The others in the list are also quite antiquated.

Looks like it might be the Dell Vostro then.

Another reason why not to go (too) used:

A computer tech here at work complained that the Dell desktops aren't that great. (The laptops are good, he says.) He's had to replace WAY too many motherboards and Western Digital hard drives on our Dell Optiplex SX280s.

Our policy at work is, Save your work to the Network Drive (file server, backed up nightly), not to your C: drive !

Michael

Why go cheap? Your time to hassle with cheap crap isn't worth the savings.

And LCD monitors rock!

The last few Dells I've bought have been increasing garbage; never again.

John

Hmm, the Dells here are laptops. But I've seen really old and beat up desktops at clients, chugging along nicely.

Same here. Best is to do both.

Never had any troubles with PCs. Unless they got really, really old and banged around a lot. Ok, this one is slowly going but it has been through a lot and it gave me 10 years of reliable service. Not bad.

Somehow my eyes can't get used to them. A few hours of Gerber reviewing and they hurt. Not with the large Trinitron tube here.

I remember the story when you went to HP. But that was a different category, full blown servers AFAIR. I really don't need that for this desk. In the lab that's different but there I've got a fast laptop which works nicely.