Pre-built machine advice

[Cobster]

Helping a friends father pick out a computer for him.
He's been running Win2000 since, well, 2000.
It's on its last leg and it's crap.
He asked me to find him a decent system that'll take XP but nothing over $400. Preferably with a diskette as well.

Thought about the first one on this page.
http://www.logiccomputerhouse.com/site/main.php?module=catalog&catID=67
Keep in mind, it's mainly for surfing, emails and Word, that's it.

 

[papasmerf]

the xp2800 is good
double the RAM.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Just a suggestion

Helping a friends father pick out a computer for him.
He's been running Win2000 since, well, 2000.
It's on its last leg and it's crap.

Maybe all it needs is a couple relatively inexpensive upgrades.
Win2000 is a good OS. Many think Win200 is even more stable than XP Pro.
Has he kept up with all his routine PM and such?
A format of the hard drive and reinstall of Win2000 will clear out all the crap that has built up since 2000 causing it to slow down.
My 10 yr old PII ran like crap till maxing out the RAM and putting in a new faster, bigger HD and Nic card for <$100 and it's like a new PC. Runs great with XP Pro and is even faster when switching over to Linux on the dual boot setup it now has.

 

[truely-appalled]

I agree that selective upgrades to an older system are a very cost-effective way to get what you need. Also, you can get very high quality versions of the older RAM, EIDE hard disk drives, video adapters, etc. through eBay very cheaply.

 

[truely-appalled]

I just reinstalled an old 450Mhz PC I have with 192MB ram and 6GB hard disk.

It was running Win2K and was real slow. After I installed WinXP Pro on it the thing just got new life breathed in to it. Cost me 1 hr of efforts..I got WinXP pro from torrent download <hehe>

That's interesting. I have never dared try WinXP on a machine that "slow." Also, my experience has been that Windows 2000 provides a more responsive user environment under high load on old (e.g., < 1GHz processor) hardware than Windows XP does. But when I've done this comparison it was always with fresh installs for both OS's. Another experience of mine has been that Windows NT/2000/XP installs will generally get less responsive over time even if one takes care to scan for viruses and ad-ware regularly, turn off unneeded services, and defragment the disk regularly. The only thing that I can think of that would do this is the accumulation of the various upgrades and patches, but of course it is almost impossible to verify this without access to the source code.

I find that the most effective way to breath new life into old hardware is to install Linux or one of the BSD Unix flavours (e.g., FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) on it, and to rebuild the kernel so that only the relevent stuff for your system is left in it (really not hard to do, and a lot less frustrating and time consuming than dealing with Windows problems).

 

[truely-appalled]

Well, ya, linux, you just spoke for 10% of people that use computers at most, kind of like the Mac community. Windows is still a lot easier for the average user. I wouldn't suggest the average Joe tackle linux. I actually have used most linux distros including more industrial stregnth unix such as AIX, Solaris, HPUX for last 15 yrs and I would still go with Windows even with all it's issues And, I would sugest WinXP is superior to Win2K in my experience. YMMV of course, just like SPs.

I agree that a small minority will use Linux, even the distributions that have the sugar-coated installers. And an even smaller minority will use FreeBSD etc.. I don't have any good first-hand information on the relative reliability of Windows 2000 or XP for various applications. Of course, XP has more of the features that Microsoft determined their market wants, and on that basis alone it may be better, in a sense, than 2000.

And in the overall scheme things, the price of new hardware is such that a small minority will find it worthwhile to "breath new life" into old hardware.

I'll shut my trap now.

 

[wumpscut]

what data said.... Canada Computers is great

for $50 more thn your budegeting plus tax he could get a dual core AMD system
http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=011596&cid=170.45

 

[WoodPeckr]

That's interesting. I have never dared try WinXP on a machine that "slow."

XP Pro runs fine on my 400Mhz PII with 384RAM since I replaced the OEM 8.5GB HDD with a 120GB faster 7200RPM HDD. Now it boots up in ~75 seconds while the OEM 5400RPM HDD took about 5-6 minutes!
Had to get a bigger HDD because all the unending updates to XP were filling up the original HDD. Now I have plenty of space and was able to partition it to allow putting Linux on, in a dual boot setup.
Always wanted to learn Linux. Now I can run either XP or Linux with no problem.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Another experience of mine has been that Windows NT/2000/XP installs will generally get less responsive over time even if one takes care to scan for viruses and ad-ware regularly, turn off unneeded services, and defragment the disk regularly. The only thing that I can think of that would do this is the accumulation of the various upgrades and patches, ......

This happened with Win95 and Win98 also. Over time any OS just accumulates junk, junk files, remnants of files in the registry etc., that build up slowing down your PC bogging down performance.

juanbrujo gave this good solution from another thread.

There are a lot of things that you can do to improve performance but the most effective one is to just format it and start new.