I don't have a nice thing to say about compaq.
They were odd, drivers were hard to find, they would deliberately
do things to force propriatary solutions: E.g. In the '486 days
they would use a different pin-out on their simms. Compaq memory
wouldn't work in anything else. Non-compaq memory wouldn't work
in it.
Guidelines:
Whatever you get, get 3-4 of them, so you have parts.
Get something that uses a standard power supply. At the school
here, broken PS is the commonest failure mode for my PC's.
Get something that the company has enough concern that the
documents are still online.
Get vanilla. Not Rocky Road.
--
Sherwood's rules of computing:
1. It will be cheaper next Tuesday.
2. The normal state of a disk is full.
3. A computer can effectively use 1 byte of ram for each Hz of CPU.
Half of that will get you 80% of the performance.
Twice that will only get you another 10% (4 cores at 2 GHz
should take
8 GB ram. But memory is an easy upgrade.)
4. Make the best guess at how long a job will take.
Double the number. Use the next bigger unit. A 3 hour job takes
6 days.
