Give Chupe Advice: Purchasing a Computer

[TheNewChupe]

My 350 mhz pc crashed. I've decided to actually invest more than $50 (the price of my last computer) in a barebones computer (case/motherboard/processor/memory).

Any advice? I'm looking at something socket 478 with a celeron processor for now, with lots of PCI slots and some USB ports and expansion slots.

Current choice:
FSB533/DDR400/4X AGP Intel Barebone -$172.73
Processor: Intel Celeron 2.0GHz 128K BOX soc 478
Motherboard: FIC *FIC VC19C 533FSB DDR266 4x AGP S/L soc 478
Case: POWMAX ATX Mid Tower 400Watt Silver Side Window w/case fan
Memory: Samsung DDR 256MB PC3200 400MHz Samsung

at http://www.7bytes.com/bbs.htm

Sound like a deal?

 

[xfer]

that's not bad! you won't be gaming, i guess, so you don't need a videocard?

 

[TheNewChupe]

i have a crappy diamond video card that will suffice for now. no gaming for me. just regular audio/video stuff, maybe some lo-fi home recording. i was surprised how cheap this was; am i missing something? besides the fact that it's a celeron and could run hot and it's only 256 ram, i mean?

 

[mindspell]

Look for the Asus barebone machines, they are a bit more expensive but you get a great quality PC.

 

[xfer]

yeah, i was shocked by the price of this. i dont know what's wrong?

 

[TheNewChupe]

the company says they test the components together as well before sending them out (for like an extra $9 i think).

 

[Josh'sRoommate]

never underestimate how necessary a good videocard is! trust me on this one...

 

[TheNewChupe]

HOTTT


x

 

[avi]

computers are amazingly cheap these days

 

[FalseTodd]

If you're going to be running Windows XP, I would highly recommend upping to 512MB of RAM. That should be plenty, but 256 is pretty barebones for an XP system...

 

[TheNewChupe]

cool, thanks for the input untodd. haven't worked in xp yet- my mom's pc has it, and she's had problems; maybe she should get some more ram (not sure how much she's got). i attributed most of her problems to her trying to run old programs (from a Windows ME platform) on a newly installed xp platform.

 

[xfer]

i've had 256 with winxp for a long time and it's worked okay. but i would suggest going to 512 just because it will make your system a pleasure to use.

 

[FalseTodd]

Yeah if you're going to be doing audio recording, I would put 512MB of RAM as a high priority.

chupe: ME designed programs should be no issue at all for an XP machine. XP is really surprisingly great about backwards compatibility, even (with a little finagling) DOS programs can be made to work...