On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 10:52 AM, Derek Smithies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 20 Jun 2008, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > > DragonPc (www.dragonpc.co.nz) for new, but still cheap. > > Having been through the debate with my colleagues over the costs: > > A molten media type box will come at $100 or so, with a 1ghz or so proc. > > A comp broker box will be $200+ > they will insist on selling it with windows xp, so the price is higher.
That is not the case in my experience. Some of their machines have windows (they may as well, the computers have a licence sticker). But many don't and i have also negotiated a lower price without windows. In fact it was not a difficult negotiation - how much without wondows - ummm errr, discussion out back - they suggest a price and you're done. They also had linux pre-loaded machines in there last time I was there (last weekend). > this is a couple of years old. > > dragonpc will sell an upgrade kit (new) for $250+gst with mem,case, > mboard,cpu but no drives, and no OS. > not much use without a hard drive, so you need to factor that in. Generally the broker's second hand machines home with a 40G disk, at least enough for what has been sought. > My view is that the newer box is going to last quite a bit longer than the > previous choices, and on a cost/hassle basis works out best.... > horses for courses. Many of the second hand boxes are good quality compaq/hp small form factor machines and that is a real advantage for certain uses. Those machines tend to be quite quiet, reasonable performancce media boxes in black/silver. > ======== > I recently bought a box from a shop which was an exlease model. It failed > the memtest in every linux live cd disk. I took it back. There were other > computers (of the same type) in the shop. On the next 3 computers I tried, > memtest failed on all of them. > The shop did take the computer back in the end, but they did mutter about > linux incompatibilities. What has memtest got to do with linux? >The shop felt the memory in the computers was OK. I > felt sorry for anyone buying them. > > At which point, I looked at the hassle factor and went to dragonpc.... >
