Howdy all,

I'm looking for a inexpensive low end system to buy my father. He will just be using it for e-mail and light browsing.

I was looking at the low end emachines (about 500 USD) but I have not heard good things about them.

I'd appreciate all commments/suggestions and links ;)

Frank

2nd hand imac? if its just for browsing and email etc the orrid little box should come with what u require. maybe delving into the wonderful world of build yer own to cut the cost.
im in the uk so im not sure exactly what would be best but arent walmart doing specials. i remember a row about them supplying cheap pc's without an OS but they should have stuff. how about dell also?
i know i can build a duron 700, 128 mb ram, 10 gb hdd etc for about 400 inc monitor in the uk so the us should be cheaper

You could get a pretty decent system for $500. If it were me, I would either buy something used from somewhere like the For Sale / Trade section at http://forums.anandtech.com or even eBay, or I would buy something from a local Ma and Pa shop. I don't know where you're from, but around here you can get a pretty decent system for about $400 without a monitor. A new 15" or a used 17" should run you another $100. eMachines are notorious for being lousy pieces of crap though, there's an entire website devoted to how eMachines as machines and as a company.. well... sucks - http://www.emachinessuck.com . Junk power supplies, $20 per incident "support", etc. I myself had an emachines monitor that went completely flakey a year into a 3 year warranty. Good luck.

Justin

on the monitor front i know theres some excellent sun \ sgi trinitron crts kicking around 2nd hand that are dirt cheap and only need a cheap adaptor to make em vga friendly. thats maybe an option for ya. and you dad wouldnt mind a 20 inch monitor would he ;)

Thanks for the info/links so far.

It has to be a windows machine. Yep, big monitor would be great.

I can handle hardware and I've though about building one for him (I'll be doing the support anyway ;) ). I just figured I'd get a better price on a used one then what I could buy new.

OTOH, some of the low end Gateways, Dells etc. seem pretty good.

BTW, cheap to me is 600 - 800 dollars.

Frank

the monitors i was refering to seem to be arround 85 pounds for a 17 inch and 120-180 for 20 depending on spec (i.e. max res) i reckon you could get the way cheaper stateside. maybe source the monitor seperately. best bet is to price up the homebuild options and see if its viable. im sure youll get plenty of help on here when it comes to building it :)

maybe theres end of line specials from dell etc (well obviously not dell as they build to spec but you get the idea).

good luck

IM purchasing a Brand New Machine XP1700 or 1800 not sure, 13gb hard drive, sound, 196 mb ram, my friend is building it for me, its not bad its gonna be like 300.00 even (without vid card)

it has case and all

I will stick a cool vid card in it.

are those all new parts? 13 gb sounds like the older generation of drives of the 4.3 8.4 etc era. these days its 10GB platters generally, if not 20 or 40.
microsoft had trubs getting non 10 gb platter drives for the xbog. seagate told em basically to get real and take 10 gigs and just dont use the extra. only west dig (no suprise there) came up with some antiquated 8 gig drives.
but back on topic.
when i do my sums in the uk (remembering i get stuff at roughly trade prices)
case atx midi 20
jetway 867 full atx 45
duron 1 gig 45
128 mb ram 20
20 GB Maxtor 7200 55
cdrom 20
10\100 nic 10
floppy keyboard mouse heatsink 25
so thats 225 plus vid card and monitor
id wait a little while and grab a gf4mx for 60ish otherwise a radeon 7500 gf ti200 or mx400 would be fine say 50 for the mx400
add on 85 for an aoc (would you name your company with initials that also stand for any old cr*p?? they didnt think that one thru well :)) 17 inch monitor nice system cheap. even cheaper stateside. double the ram would be good. maybe up the cpu tho it aint needed for what you want.

I buy used machines for about 50-60$ then about $50 for shipping

Usually like PII 350 - 6.4 gb HD, 64mb of RAM

Cheap but i upgrade the HD, and ram then use it for linux

Joe

http://www.compexp.net
I'm not sure if they ship, but they make excellent computers that aren't too expensive. Mine was $410 without the monitor.

www.tigerdirect.com had some nice baseline systems for around $400-$500

eMachine's low end model (1Ghz) machine is only $399 right now.

emachines.com

Originally posted by bitserve
eMachine's low end model (1Ghz) machine is only $399 right now.

emachines.com

Yea, I think I'll pass on emachines. From what I've heard, they are junk that will fry out in a couple of months.

Frank

Originally posted by ffeingol
Yea, I think I'll pass on emachines. From what I've heard, they are junk that will fry out in a couple of months.

Frank

Good choice. I've worked on several eMachines and apparently they still believe in using 120Watt power supplies. And this was on an Intel 800MHz PC with a whopping 32MB of RAM.:rolleyes: Of course that was the reason for the PC shutting down on its own. After switching all the parts to a different case with a 250Watt power supply, the problems mysteriously disappeared.

My suggestion, is to stay away from anything sold in Sears, Office max, Office Depot, Costco, and anything you see ads for on TV. Seriously, it's all crap. Gateway, Dell (used to be good, maybe it's just the low end, "so cheap, we don't ene care to try" stuff they make?), Compaq, PacBell, Emachines, etc. I got a top of the line board, CPU, case, power supply, and 256 megs RAM (and more) all for far below $500 from TigerDirect new. A drive, monitor and video card (if it doesn't have onboard video) and a Winmodem (which will work fine if it's Windows) will fit into your price range. However, you might want to make sure it has a floppy and CD Rom too -- but we're not talking much for a top of the line, very, very fast and well performing, stable system. You can surely look at cheaper boards that are still good, as well as CPU types and speeds, etc. and save more money and still have a good system.

For a good article on building a PC check:

http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/

Where do oyu live?

I know that in Toronto, there are many stores that will build a high-end computer, all new parts, etc ~$800 CDN =~$500USD

That would be either 1800+ athlon or 1.8p4 with everything you could want.

If you are in a large area ie LA or NYC, you can probably find similar deals.

I'm not in that big of a town. I'm just outside Milwaukee WI.

I have no problem building it myself. I'd just need recommendations for decent mainboards. I've got an ASUS on my box and I'm happy with it, but other comments are welcome.

Frank

Originally posted by ffeingol
I'm not in that big of a town. I'm just outside Milwaukee WI.

I have no problem building it myself. I'd just need recommendations for decent mainboards. I've got an ASUS on my box and I'm happy with it, but other comments are welcome.

Frank


Hi,

I just replied to your PM. (and this is what I said). Although first, I'd like to say, that as far as I know, ASUS is a very good bet and has a good reputation -- although I've never used one, I hear good things. In fact, I was looking for one, but settled on a Soyo. Anyway, here's what I sent in the PM, so other people can agree or agrue that this is a good choice (since it's just my opinion, choice and suggestion -- and there might be better one's out there).

I hope you don't mean a Tiger board? But if you're talking about Tigerdirect, they sell ASUS, Shuttle and SOYO and a lot of othe good boards. I checked out a lot of stuff about all the boards, and the highet rated one with users and technicians (as well as reviewers and benchmarks) all said that the SOYO Dragon Plus board was the best. It had everything I wanted too, so I got it. I'd recommend the Soyo Dragon Plus board over any other's -- it just looked better, had better reviews or better specs than any other board I could find. I got that and an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHZ CPU and some DDR RAM. The board, CPU and RAM are all 266 MHZ front bus. The board also supports up to 8 IDE devices, or 2 RAIDs. It's got onboard Promise RAID, supports SCSI or IDE/UMDA (also supports DMA 33, 66 and 100)), it has onboard sound and LAN -- although I didn't want a board with anything onboard, it isn't so bad -- you can simply disable the onboard NIC/LAN and sound (and RAID) if you want (which I did disable them). I'm running a few versions of Linux, BSD and WinNT/Win2000 Pro and it all works very well and it's very fast. Well, that's my suggestion anyway. The Soyo Dragon Plus board is only $150 or so, the CPU was less than that. I didn't want any XP CPU's, so the Thunderbird 1.4 GHZ was the best choice.