wtb: cheap computer

[bryco13]

so my laptop is fried, i almost loast everything and have only retrieved my pics thus far. looking for either a laptop, desktop, cheaper the better with wireless online capability, please help! i have no comp access right now, so please email me: bryco13@yahoo.com thanks!
-bryan

[Jim]

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry Giggity: BlackBerry8330/4.5.0.175 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

Wasn't iglu selling a bunch of laptops last year?

[noxin]

and you can get a low-end desktop or netbook for like 300 these days.

[Cerberus]

and you can get a low-end desktop or netbook for like 300 these days.

and thats a new price

if you wanted an off-lease refurb you could get a runnable desktop for $125

[KillBill]

There is a place in Fitchburg that I picked up an off lease
HP workstation for $70 .....1 GB RAM P4....runs like a champ.

[seth399]

I have a monitor for 60 bucks if you find only a tower. 17" flat panel

[bryco13]

thanks for the input folks, i'm thinking about buying a new desktop now (seem more reliable than my laptops have ever been) and companies to stay away from?

[noxin]

anything on the low end is going to be similar quality. It'll last you probably 2-3 years.

[seth399]

thanks for the input folks, i'm thinking about buying a new desktop now (seem more reliable than my laptops have ever been) and companies to stay away from?

I got a Dell system a few years ago and have been real happy with it, was like 600 bucks or so and was more mid level than low end. Built it on the site and had it shipped to me, didn't take very long either.

[bryco13]

There is a little store up the street from me. I think I'm gonna go with a Dell Vostro setup, it seems a little more heavy duty, which is good for me. Anyone have one of these?

[Stegosaurous]

Build the machine. I built my own using the parts i'll list soon and it cost me 500$:

E8400 3.0ghz - OC'ed to 4ghz
Asus ATI 4850
4 GB OCZ HPC Reaper 1066mhz
Asus p5q pro
700 Watt OCZ PSU
LG Dvd burrner
DVD - ROM drive.
(i just upgraded to these HDD's)
2 Western Digital RAID Edition (RE3) 750 GB SATA II HDD's in a RAID 0
(Previous HDD's)
2 Western Digital AAKS 640GB SATA II HDD's in RAID 0

[Stegosaurous]

I'll even build you one if youd like.

[rice_rocket]

I got a smoking deal online for an HP refurbished model.. it was $385 shipped I think.. Quad core athlon, 7gb ram 500gb hdd to boot!

Anyways.. if you want something on the super cheap, I *believe* this box here at my house is good to go if you get yourself a working hard drive. P4 with a few little things in it... If you come get it and bring me a beer or a coffee I'll be happy enough

I'm cleaning house now and I have a small pile of stuff that has to go and may be worth something to the right person that can use it I'm such a packrat!

[Jim]

I'll even build you one if youd like.

if you like him, you wont put Western Digital hard drives in there

[bryco13]

new laptop found, thanks for the help folks!
-bryan

[Stegosaurous]

if you like him, you wont put Western Digital hard drives in there

AHAHAH. Sorry to say but if you like your data you'll go WD. And these RE3's rock ass. TLER, 32 MB cache (per drive), dual processors onboard, PMR, StableTrac and the list goes on...

What should he run for HDD's? Seeing how i've used WD for the past... probably 8 years and i have 90% of them still in workable condition i dont see the issue.

[Cerberus]

AHAHAH. Sorry to say but if you like your data you'll go WD. And these RE3's rock ass. TLER, 32 MB cache (per drive), dual processors onboard, PMR, StableTrac and the list goes on...

What should he run for HDD's? Seeing how i've used WD for the past... probably 8 years and i have 90% of them still in workable condition i dont see the issue.

seriously?!
a 10% failure rate is acceptable to you?!

i'm not even going to name my fav HDD manuf. since i know they ALL have had a bad batch of product at one time or another..
but i tend to go for the biggest named manufacturer with the best warranty.. like 5 years

[Stegosaurous]

The 10% failure was due to a HDD controller going bad coupled with the fact the PSU was going out and sending power surges. I lost 2 500GB drives in the same week. Meh, it is what it is.

And you go with Seagate i'm guessing? How bout the fact that they put out an entire series of drives (the 1 or 1.5TB drives) that would crash, or had major problems due to a flaw in the recording technology haha. GO SEAGATE... wait...

I called WD after showing an Error on my array, overnight i had two 750gb RE3 drives show up at my door. Cant ask for more. WD warranty policy Seems i have a 5 year waranty as well. Meh, again it is what it is... This is gonna turn into a pissing contest and as we all know, hdd's go down for different reasons in different cases. WD has been nothing short of amaizing to me after all the years using them. Every Maxtor i've used has been shitty. After reading about seagates issues i stayed away from them, though i run a segate 1tb external after they fixed their issues.

[wedge98]

I've been building computers for over 13 years now(jeez I feel old saying that). I've had my fair share of components fail. I think I've had everything break except for sound cards. If you want to build a fool proof system which will be very reliable you should look into a MIRROR RAID setup (RAID 1). This setup will use two hard drives to store all of your data. In the event of a hard drive failure, you simply swap the bad drive for a new one, copy the good drive's data over(this operation is built into the RAID controller), and you're up and running again with no data loss.

That begin said, this does not protect eh user from virus', fire, lightning, flood, etc... For that protection, you need either an online backup or a HD/USB key backup that is in another location.

As far as Hard drive brand's. I've had IBM, Seagate, and WD all fail on me at one-point. I buy drives based on the warranty. There is a samsung 1TB drive with a 7-year warranty for $150 right now. Not too bad, but you can get a WD 1TB with a 5-year warranty as well for $100.

After being burned by almost every brand I've tried (minus a few like seasonic PSU) I have zero brand loyalty. I design machines based on quality of the components and the machine's purpose.

If you are going prebuild, I would highly recommend acer for a value brand and zt systems for non-value. I have an acer laptop going on 3 years of heavy daily abuse and the only part that went south was the dvd-drive(simply $30 upgrade to a nice DVD burner). ZT systems uses top-end components(ASUS,etc...) and backs them with a 5-year warranty. The machines do not come loaded with unwanted software and are just great. Best part is you can buy them for dirt cheap at costco.

Just my 2 cents on this topic

[Cerberus]

i have no interest in a pissing match.
been there, done that.
as i said, all manufacturers have had bad runs of product.
but yeah, fuck maxtor

the fact that drives die, being what it is, i have all mirrored external storage.
no more worries.

[Stegosaurous]

Wedge, why not run a RAID 5 and get the speed increase as well?

[wedge98]

Wedge, why not run a RAID 5 and get the speed increase as well?

For now, I have not owned/built a PC with RAID 5 capability on the MB. I also do not own a MB that has more than 4 drive connections and I do not want to purchase a PCI/PCIx RAID controller. So I decided to go with a RAID 1 for now. When I build my new PC(1-2 years from now) I plan to do some really fun stuff but I'm holding out as long as possible to let Solid State Hard Drives grow in capacity and speed. I'd like to have 4TB+ of drive space(Current at 1.5TB), an 8 core CPU, and 24GB of RAM running on windows 7 ultimate.

[Stegosaurous]

Now that i think of it, i dont believe my P5q-Pro has RAID 5 capabilities... And ya it's wicked expensive to get a RAID card that is not shitty that can handle the enterprise level RAID's we speak of.

My thoughts on your future build real quick...

8 Core CPU will probably be way overkill. Currently Quad cores are way under utilized and most of the time 2 cores sit completly idle. This includeds encoding/transcoding applications, ripping programs, and other processor intesive apps. Only games like Crisis utilize 4 cores... and even then the results are marginal.

24 GB of RAM, unless your running a massive VM powerhouse... way overkill. I could see 8, maybe 12 GB of RAM. But still holy shit dude. If your looking for graphics processing power look into a strong GPU. A GPU is way more powerful and utilizes RAM way more efficiently than a Processor or applications would. Windows 7 is a beautiful thing. I currently am on it, with the previous specs i listed and as of now i'm using 32% of my physical RAM so abou 1310MB currently. I'll check what COD MW2 puts me up to.

As for the HDD's. I love solid state i cant wait for them to come down. I currently have 1.36TB of internal HDD's, with another 1.2TB on the shelf waiting for a larger, more ventalated case, and a 1 TB external. I'm close to the 4 TB mark

EDIT: My MOBO allows for 0/1/5/10 RAID levels. If i can ever afford another RE3, i'll set it up. RAID 5 makes me moist.

[wedge98]

Now that i think of it, i dont believe my P5q-Pro has RAID 5 capabilities... And ya it's wicked expensive to get a RAID card that is not shitty that can handle the enterprise level RAID's we speak of.

My thoughts on your future build real quick...

8 Core CPU will probably be way overkill. Currently Quad cores are way under utilized and most of the time 2 cores sit completly idle. This includeds encoding/transcoding applications, ripping programs, and other processor intesive apps. Only games like Crisis utilize 4 cores... and even then the results are marginal.

24 GB of RAM, unless your running a massive VM powerhouse... way overkill. I could see 8, maybe 12 GB of RAM. But still holy shit dude. If your looking for graphics processing power look into a strong GPU. A GPU is way more powerful and utilizes RAM way more efficiently than a Processor or applications would. Windows 7 is a beautiful thing. I currently am on it, with the previous specs i listed and as of now i'm using 32% of my physical RAM so abou 1310MB currently. I'll check what COD MW2 puts me up to.

As for the HDD's. I love solid state i cant wait for them to come down. I currently have 1.36TB of internal HDD's, with another 1.2TB on the shelf waiting for a larger, more ventalated case, and a 1 TB external. I'm close to the 4 TB mark

EDIT: My MOBO allows for 0/1/5/10 RAID levels. If i can ever afford another RE3, i'll set it up. RAID 5 makes me moist.

I'm aiming for 8 cores because I like to keep my MB/CPU/RAM combo for long periods of time(3 years or so). With Intel releasing it's 48 core processors to University's this year, I expect to see leaps in multi-thread development and use. That being said I want to ensure I am covered in the multi-core department for 3 years.

24GB of RAM: why? Because I get off on large RAM amounts and I have a few programs that max out my 4GB of current RAM(Human Genone string matching for Bioinformatics). If I had 32GB of RAM I could map the entire human genone. ;D Most MB only support up to 24GB and there are 24GB kits out now, but if that expands to 32GB I'll move up.

yeah, solid state is just awesome. No more head crashes!!! The SATA 6 and Flash combo is going to make HDs read/write/access times super fast

The target completion date for my new machine is the new Mechwarrior game. I'm a huge fan of all mech games and when Smith and Tinker announced a new game I was sooo psyched! Maybe they'll have something done for 2013.

I would also like to run 3 monitors to give myself an front, left, and right side view of the game and maybe the game will be made in 3D which would be too awesome for words.

Imagine all the stuff flying at your face as you walk around in your giant mech pummels others.... mmmmmm heaven....

Anyways, all of this depends of course on bang for buck(except RAM, gotta have it!!) and what I have to spend on the system.

The future of gaming/TV is 3D and is going to be amazing. I have yet to play 3D games due to costs of the setups, but from what I hear it gives the games a whole new perspective and when done right, it's really amazing. Imagine what could be done in the horror section like silent hill and such. I would certain piss my pants if stuff what jumping out at me in 3D, lol

anyways, glad to have a PC enthusiast on the forums

I'll throw up a thread whenever I build the next machine. I'm thinking of going with a full tower case this time to hold lots of Hard drives.

[Stegosaurous]

MMMMMM pure sex right there man. Pure sex. haha

I can see your point with a lot of those specs... and i gotta say... You'll be rockin man. You'll be rockin out with your cocka out.

Is the Genome project like F@H at all? I've never heard of it, and am rather interested.