| Rich Freeman on 28 Feb 2014 07:48:06 -0800 |
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| Re: [PLUG] no frills computer advise |
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Keith Brown <keith6014@gmail.com> wrote: > I've had bad experience with building a PC from parts because so I want to > avoid that and ofcourse I want to avoid a Mac (which my girlfriend insists I > have) Honestly, I've become a big fan of the build from parts thing, mainly because over time you save a lot on power supplies, cases, and so on. Granted, my Gentoo install still has some cruft from 2001 on it from config files moving around and such - it basically has been one continuous operation with both hardware and drives being swapped out under the OS. I guess that system is the ultimate example of the pet vs cattle system management debate. >From what I've seen the companies that just sell PCs as a unit tend to use the cheapest parts they can find, because nobody cares what chipset is in their box. Ditto for things like drive cache, sector size, and so on. I upgraded to a nicer case recently and I don't know how I lived without it - sideways drive mounting means RAID replacements are trivial, and doing anything in the case is way more convenient without the cable mass over the motherboard. That said, if all you want is a desktop that works, I'm sure you can't really go wrong with a $300 PC and sticking Ubuntu or whatever on it. Granted, if you don't need X11 software you might just consider a chromebook instead. Rich ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug