$400 PC (how far we've come)

My friend and I were curious as to what could be the least one could pay for a good home PC. Given that I remember buying a bottom-of-the-barrel Packard Bell for $2000 just 12 years ago... I think we've come very far.

This is what we came up with:

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AMD64 2.0GHz Dual-core CPU
1GB of DDR2 SDRAM
Nvidia 6100 Video (onboard)
80GB Western Digital Hard Drive
CD-RW
Case/Power supply
17" Widescreen High-resolution monitor (1400x900)

We were shopping for the parts at newegg.com

Put it together, pop in an Ubuntu 7.10 CD, and 1-2 hours later you have a great home computer, for ONLY $400!

Amazing!

I looked at the "shopping cart" and almost wanted to buy it, just to show it off.

CD-RW or DVD-RW? Doesn't make much sense, anymore, to get a CD-RW. I saw at Sam's club, they were selling one of the HP Demos on the "as is/open box" rack for $450. It had all the bells and whistles and came with 19" widescreen!

Trashman said:

CD-RW or DVD-RW? Doesn't make much sense, anymore, to get a CD-RW. I saw at Sam's club, they were selling one of the HP Demos on the "as is/open box" rack for $450. It had all the bells and whistles and came with 19" widescreen!

Click to expand...

I chose CDRW, but DVDRW is about $15 more.

The thing is, this isn't an "open box" system... it's brand new, and I doubt those HPs had 1GB of ram, or a dual-core CPU.

Plus, I don't think they'd be as cute as this tiny little case : )

Yes, I know, it isn't an open box system. The HP did have a dual-core CPU and 2gb of RAM. It was an open box display item, however. You're absolutely right, though, computers are getting to be really, really inexpensive. Fry's often has complete dual-core systems for $400 (or less).

I'm hoping LCD monitors continue to fall in price (likewise I assume that would correspond to LCD TVs as well). The cheapest I see in Newegg is a 17" for $149.

With a 17" CRT, I've seen similar spec packages for as little as $200-300 from Emachine an Acer. I got my Toshiba laptop for $400 new two years ago... Seen better Toshiba's since for $300

$400, 2.0 ghz, 1gb ram, that's incredible!

My first computer was a Mac LC. I don't remember what I paid or how fast the processor was, but it had ~40mb hard drive space and ~5mb ram. After that, I paid $1,800 for a Windows ME system at Best Buy, roughly year 2000. I think it was 700mhz, which I thought was blazingly fast. When it blew up(almost literally, it was belching black smoke and burned the paint off the case outside the power supply) 3 years later I bought this Windows 98 box, used, for all of $200. It's 300mhz slower, same 128mb of ram, yet runs 2x faster than the Windows ME pile ever did. This was a rather blatant lesson to me about Windows "progress". When this computer dies it will be my last Windows computer, ever.

Note: my computer needs are extremely modest; mostly word processing, email, and web browsing. The most intense graphics I run are the smileys here on CPF.

I can only imagine how fast a 2.0ghz computer would be without Windows' crap bogging it down. And for a mere $400!

:buddies:

It's indeed amazing how low the price of PCs has come lately. One big driving force behind this is the historically low price of RAM. Now 2GB of RAM can be had for as little as $50. Even super low-end machines can afford to have at least 1GB. Hard disks are another thing which has fallen greatly in price. I remember back in the early 1990s when a new hard disk was over $300. In today's dollars this would be ~$600, more than the cost of an entire low-end PC. This isn't even getting into the fact that the c. 1990 hard disk was well under 1% of the capacity of today's. In fact, storage in general has outpaced the needs of most users. There was a time when you actually had to manage your hard disk space, removing programs you seldom used to make way for others. Now you can keep all sorts of garbage, plus your photo collection, music, even videos, with room to spare. I guess as HD video comes into common use we'll finally have a real need to develop larger hard disks, probably eventually replacing magnetic disks with solid-state storage.

More impressive than that is that you can get a fully working laptop for $500, if you catch the right promotions.
$500 of desktop computer will give rather more performance than $500 of laptop (if only for the godawful integrated video cards cheap laptops all use), and laptops now all come with Vista and can't run XP without considerable fiddling, but it wasn't so long ago that any laptop, no matter how crappy, would set you back twice as much as the cheapest computer you could get.
Add another couple hundred bucks and you get laptops with Radeon Mobility or Nvidia Go cards that can run games respectably.

And then we're starting to see things like the OLPC XO-1 and the Asus EEEpc, which promise to deliver light-duty computing power for ridiculously little money.

Yes, we've definitely come a long way. I can't wait to see what we'll have in the future.

eventually technology will hit a peak where software/hardware requirements will not need the new technology and it will become redundant or latent for awhile

I remember the time when dad bought me my first flash drive., a Lexar 8MB, a far stretch from the floppies, but now flash drives comes in 8 GBs ...

I see no point of having widescreen capability, high video card quality, and a built in media drive in a laptop....but then again, I favor long runtime so my choices are actually pretty limited [to that of IBM thinkpads with no speakers and no media drives, and a whopping 3 hour [tested]runtime on long life]

computers get hot, cramming everything to a little box is asking for rapid hardware deterioration, unless you have absolutely no space in your room it might not be much of a good idea to buy a lappy as the primary PC, but thats just me.

the good things I like about about laptops: no wires, portable, built in UPS :naughty: :naughty: :naughty:
from the high performance laptops I see these days in stores, they'll suck the poor 18650s dry in no time

Fallingwater said:

More impressive than that is that you can get a fully working laptop for $500, if you catch the right promotions.
$500 of desktop computer will give rather more performance than $500 of laptop (if only for the godawful integrated video cards cheap laptops all use), and laptops now all come with Vista and can't run XP without considerable fiddling, but it wasn't so long ago that any laptop, no matter how crappy, would set you back twice as much as the cheapest computer you could get.
Add another couple hundred bucks and you get laptops with Radeon Mobility or Nvidia Go cards that can run games respectably.

And then we're starting to see things like the OLPC XO-1 and the Asus EEEpc, which promise to deliver light-duty computing power for ridiculously little money.

Yes, we've definitely come a long way. I can't wait to see what we'll have in the future.

Click to expand...

I got my laptop 2 years ago for $400. I've seen better for $300 since. Office Depot and Circuit City run some amazing deals every now and then.

Marduke said:

With a 17" CRT, I've seen similar spec packages for as little as $200-300 from Emachine an Acer. I got my Toshiba laptop for $400 new two years ago... Seen better Toshiba's since for $300

Click to expand...

main problem with laptops is you can't really upgrade them. You end up throwing away a bundle that includes an expensive battery and a largish LCD screen on top of all the other laptop components, bad for the pocket book, bad for the environment.

My strategy is to have a couple of reasonably large cases around which can be upgraded overtime and incrementally with new components. Eventually the motherboard/PS/memory/CPU get changed and you've got a nearly brand new computer just like you want it. I also tend to add several rounds of new harddrives. Just put in an awesome terrabyte HD with silent technology...and with quiet fans, basically the worst sound you hear is the actual CPU fan (I guess I could change that to a quieter version...).

one technology I try to avoid is (re)writeable CD/DVDs. Amazing how they pile up. It's just easier to backup material onto 1-2 removable hard drives and avoid all the hassle.

plus, with formats ever changing (CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RAM and a zillion other writeable DVD types, now two incompatible HD-DVD and BLU-RAE DVD...you have to keep transferring stuff all the time, kind of like those old-time floppies).

Like Ilium, I like large USB flashdrives as well, got one 8xGB filled up, and awaiting another one through the mail (on special for $43 or so! hope it doesn't turn out to be crud at that price!). Also looking at the new 16xGB flashdrives, a couple of those and I can backup most important files onto them and store them all in one small box!

There are some very attractive prices on gear. When building new, I seem to always hit the same price point which is about $1,400 for everything.

back then its ridiculous, now giving away 1 GB flash drives [$15-$25 a piece] seems almost perfect

I bought my sandisk cruzer micro1 GB for $200, that was years and years ago

Illum_the_nation said:

back then its ridiculous, now giving away 1 GB flash drives [$15-$25 a piece] seems almost perfect

I bought my sandisk cruzer micro1 GB for $200, that was years and years ago

Click to expand...

Sounds like it's time to upgrade to a 4GB for $40.

Illum_the_nation said:

back then its ridiculous, now giving away 1 GB flash drives [$15-$25 a piece] seems almost perfect

Click to expand...

I bought a 4 GB flash drive at Staples a month ago for only $30. It was actually my first USB drive. I liked the concept from day one, but until recently the prices were just too high, and the sizes too small. 4 GB is in the range of sizes that are starting to get useful. You can run a Linux install, or a bare-bones Windows system, from such a drive.

At the current rate of progress (~4x increase in capacity annually), it won't be long before these get into the hundreds of GB for $25 or so. I'd bet within 5 years solid-state storage pretty much replaces anything based on spinning disks. They've already pretty much obsoleted floppies, zip disks, etc.

i found my buddy a new dell pc with dual core intel cpu windows xp a 19 inch lcd for 399.a course cames with all other stuff to

Brand name PCs are the work of the devil. Avoid them at all costs, no matter how much cheaper they might be.

lol i know but i couldnt have built em a pc with a xp os for the money they had

Just ordered one of the new Asus EEE PC laptops. Its very small, and comes with Linux. Just got it for surfing the web.

http://eeepc.asus.com/en/