Dixons in town were having a closing down sale so I had a browse. They had a Packard Bell system without monitor for just under £130. It is a couple of year old Athlon 1.7GHz thing with DVD/CDR, 256M and 40G hard disk. It was cheap because it had some kind of traumatic accident and the case was severly bent. They told me it worked and gave me a 6 month guarantee so I bought it.
I have put it's guts into the case of my old desktop pc so it is now more presentable.
Pros:
It feels much faster than my old system, and in fact any system i have used.
Hopefully it won't lock up randomly like the old one: this is what made me lose confidence in the old system and not want to use it.
It has freed up extra 128M memory and a CD/RW for my Gentoo box.
I can build a cheap system with the bits left over for my mum. I can set it to PIO mode so it won't crash and it'll still be faster than what she's got.
I have a spare Windows XP Home licence
I have a spare 80G hard disk to fix my sky plus box with
It's got a keyboard with lots of extra functions. I just found a function button where ctrl should be: function+left takes me to line start.
Nice mouse
Lots of software. Microsoft Zoo Tycoon!
Cons:
Not the most high tech motherboard I could have bought (MS 6511). Still, I found a reference for it on the internet easy enough.
Only 2 PCI slots: 1 after network card is put in. No ISA (rip).
Probably USB 1.1 from it's vintage. I have a USB 2 card to put in but then all the PCI slots are gone.
It starts up quite rapidly but it takes 30 seconds to shut down: very annoying when rebooting.
In a nutshell: I'm happy.
A footnote on why I use Windows and Gentoo. I think Windows is a good GUI and Linux is a good server. X apps are just not as slick as windows apps and setting up Windows server software is a nightmare of tree's and property pages (I'm talking Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, ISS and ISA, I use them at work and I hate them all).
Peter's Moblog
