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My wife went back to school this fall for a MS and wanted a "new"
computer, at least something more powerful than the P233 laptop she had
been using. She bought a year-or-so old Dell Celeron 733 for $300 on
eBay, replaced the 64Meg of RAM with 256 Meg for $30, added a Zip drive
for another $30, added a $10 network card for use with the DSL that we
have, loaded it up with Win98, Office 2000, IE 5.5, and Outlook, and it
seems to be doing just fine for her.
Jim, I hope that you and your daughter find something that fits her
needs. And good luck to her in school.
Gary Fritz wrote:
> > I need to buy a computer for my daughter to take to college.
> > Prefer Dell, desktop.
> >
> > I notice Dell SDRAM specs max out at 512 except for the onces w
> > RDRAM--which costs a lot more. Is RDRAM worth the premium? 512
> > seems light. A Dell with 756. don't understand why Dell caps
> > SDRAM at 512.
>
> Unless your daughter plans to do heavy mesh analysis or some other
> hugely compute- and memory-intensive computation, I suggest you are
> considering a WHOLE lot more horsepower than she needs.
>
> What will she use the system for? If she's going to use it for word
> processing and email, then you could save yourself a lot of money by
> buying a smaller/older system. There are lots of used Dell systems
> on eBay -- some reconditioned, still with Dell warrantee -- for a
> whole lot less than new.
>
> For light use like that, a 400-500MHz system with 128MB or 256MB is
> MORE than enough. Hell, for the last three years *I've* used a
> 450MHz P3 with 256MB of RAM for my daily work -- heavy-duty
> Tradestation 4.0 system development, plus 6-12 other apps like PFG
> BEST order entry platform, Excel, MS Word, 3-4 IE5.5's, Pegasus
> emailer, Xnews newsreader, vi text editor, etc -- and it's done me
> just fine. The critical thing is to use a decent OS like NT or W2k
> instead of the unreliable Win9x/ME systems. Personally I'd stay away
> from XP.
>
> I finally decided to upgrade my system this month. Wanted a dual-CPU
> system so the TS Server could inhale one CPU and leave the other one
> alone for me to use for other things. I'd intended to go with Dell,
> but decided it just wasn't worth the cost. I ended up with an HP
> dual-Xeon (2 * 1.0GHz), 512MB of ECC RDRAM, 40GB HD, CR-RW, etc, for
> only $900 (no monitor, just the box). An equivalent Dell was 2x
> more. The Dell name has a darn good reputation, but I wasn't sure it
> was worth a 100% premium. We'll see, once I get the HP up &
> running...
>
> Gary
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