Re: buy or build computer?
Hello Peter,
Sorry your Gateway died. I have the same machine, about same age and still
running! Currently as internet gateway on my little network at home. Never
had any problems with it. (knock wood.)
About your question. I have thought of building my own machine too, but never
got around to it. I was allways scared by the sheer amount of possible audio
and video cards and so on. I am not a hardware hobbyist, so how do I know I
would make the right choices and not get incompatibles?
Having someone else responsible for the hardware configuration seemed to me
not such a bad idea.
If you do go ahead, I would first try to get a configuration and then, before
actually buying it, browse the net to see if there are known problems with
Linux supporting any of the components you have chosen.
Success,
Frans
On Sunday 09 March 2003 19:55, Peter Christensen wrote:
> My five-year-old Gateway Pentium 200 MHz died recently. (It won't boot
> from the hard drive or a rescue disk, and it won't go into bios-setup
> mode.) I don't think it's fixable, and anyway, it was so slow that it's
> probably time to replace it. Temporarily I'm using a borrowed computer
> with Win95. Yuck!
>
> For my next computer I want to make sure that everything is compatible with
> Linux. I searched this list and found a few posts about buying computers.
> They were a little old (one or two years), so I'm wondering if the
> situation has changed. A few people recommended the AMD Athlon processor
> over Pentiums. And Matrox for video, Soundblaster or Ensoniq for sound.
> Any thoughts on this?
>
> I've heard that computers nowadays are built with the cheapest possible
> components, so I was wondering if building it myself would be a good idea.
> It might not be much cheaper than buying one from Dell or Gateway, but if
> the result was a better quality machine it might be worthwhile. So far
> I've only had to replace broken components in my Gateway, such as the hard
> drive and CDrom, also added memory. Building a computer would be a
> challenge, but I think I'd enjoy doing it...
>
> Peter Christensen
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