Computers

That was 2 years ago. Already maxed the hard drive, gone to twin 80's (with a 120 gig external backup) and another 256 ram card. HP has a big honkin machine with twin pentium 4s and 1024 RAM. A pretty good article on it in Popular Photo (Dec 05). Maybe someday soon.... They say under $800 street price.

Right now my bottleneck is bandwidth.....

I would suggest a Wal-Mart special on a printer. You can buy printers cheap as a ink jet refill, although most all new printers are only half full of ink when new. I so far got buy pretty well on the bulk refills. If I recall correct a Lexmark Z6000 new was like thirty dollars on a close out. It pumps the paper out pretty fast. Dave NE IA

After 30 years of daily use in my office, I think HP is the only way to go. Both their computers and printers give you very good bang for the book. And there really is no "low end" on quality for an HP.

Right now there are lots of refurbished rigs for rediculously low prices.

I have a 6-year old Gateway P3 866 machine that I use every day for a home business. It"s a bit sluggish but for the most part I have never had any significant trouble with it. Had to replace the cooling fan this year ($6.00) and now the CD burner went out (new one >$25.00). I did bump the memory up to 384mb and overall it does well. I have to keep after the spyware and I try to get the updates when they are available. I do some PowerPoint work and some of the intense graphics can stop it cold which can be pretty frustrating but I am strapped for cash right now and am getting by.

I have been looking at some of the lower end machines that are out there with mostly Celeron processors figuring that anything would be better and faster than what I have now. There are some good deals to be had especially on close-out models. I look for ones that have the best upgrade capabilities especially for memory.

2 years ago now I bought a $1200 Dell 8000 for my gollege daughter. That was the mack-daddy unit then with a P-4 2.8ghz HT processor. Came with 512mb of memory and an 80gb drive and dual optival drives. This is one smokin" machine but one day out of warranty it started to develop issues. Dell forced me to buy the $250.00 warranty extension and then took 2 weeks to fix a problem (supposed to be next day). They replaced the CPU, motherboard, hard drive, and memory. It"s running fine now but that was a very frustrating experience and I"m not sure that I would buy another Dell because of it. By the way, I now have a middle-eastern accent.

The last few days I have been looking into building my own for the next machine. For about $500.00 you can build a real nice unit that is comparable to the daughter"s Dell but for my business I could really use a laptop.

Hope this helps somewhat.

It all depends on what you want it to do. With more money you get more power. (Insert grunting noise.)

I have been building systems for many years. I have gotten to the point that if someone wants a low end processor like a celeron or sempron, then buy the walmart system. If they want some thing to work well for gaming, photos, etc. Use the P4 or Athlon. P4 and Athlon cpu's also have several flavors and speeds. Low end old Athlons will run circles around new celerons and semprons.

Bottom line is figure out what you want it to do. Ask someone to help if necessary.(Preferably a person that speaks geek.) And fit that machine to your purpose.

I use mostly Celeron 2000 at my wife's office, with a fast network for her database system.

I have a couple of AMD's that didn't work very well using Winders 98 and ME. Windows 2000 changed everything; they work well now.

For internet use, there is NO noticeable difference between my Pentium II 400 MHZ notebook, and my 2800MHZ Pentium IV desktop.

For some photo and video editing, the 2800 chugs along.

The kid also has a Pentium IV 2800, and is looking for something FASTER for gaming.

Quickbooks Pro runs happily on the 400 MHZ unit, to.

Do you do run any engineering programs, or high-end financial programs or graphics programs, or is the 'puter to be for basic word processing and internet use?