RE: buy or build computer?

["David Turetsky" <davidturetsky@earthlink.net>]

If you surf over to the Micronux web site (I bought the 7 CD Woody
distribution from them) you will see some pretty rock solid linux
configurations at very decent prices. They also link to a bunch of
reviews and comparisons of the intel board vs whatever else is out there

There's also a link to intel's web site. When I went through all this a
few weeks ago, it seemed to me to open up a range of possibilities, from
build your own, to paying Micronux to do it for you, only paying for
what you needed, not bloated software and service costs

It was an interesting exercise and I think it may help you fine-tune
your own judgment about how you want to proceed


In any event, you should be able to carry over many of your peripheral
boards and hard drives to the new system. You might also want to
consider investing in a bigger power supply ( >= 500W) if you plan to
attach a lot of hard drives

-- 
David


>>> Frans Pop [mailto:aragorn@tiscali.nl] 
>>> Sunday, March 09, 2003 2:30 PM

	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.


>>> 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...