Oh.

QooQ:

>>Paul ??? you've never built a box?<<

Nope :( ....only bought 1 pc in my life. Only had internet access for about 3-4yrs.

I've seen all those cool articles on akiba (a japanese site that has all the newest computer stuff on there) - don't they sell computer stuff for reasonable prices over there? I ask this because International insured airmail is expensive!


Adrian

Have a look at:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/...q4/011031/index.html

for a lot less an amd 1800 (let alone the new 1900) beats a p4 in a lot of things (p4 seem to only win out at low resolutions, who's going to use that?)

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.

I don't see how they can say a XP 1500+ has a better price/perf when the 1600+ is a bit faster, yet costs like $5 more...


Adrian

Adrian,
whahaha, yeah right
... good hardware comes from across the ocean! akihabara is like on the other island too! You actually have to go into the shops and dicker like the devil to get any type of deal, also if you're not a regular customer they take you for tourist!

cpuz and moboz are pretty expensive ... cases on on the other hand ... hmmm ... my mini tower atx was only $40 ... then again half the screws strip easily ... problem came from some prison in china!

paul ... oh ... sorry I did it so I'm sure you can handle it!

Drew did forget about all the fun stuff about drivers and such!

installing drivers for winbloze was the part I had the most trouble. wiring was actually easier than setting up my wide screen sony wega TV.

---

openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

Untill you get a little video output on your screen with a hardware listing confirming stuff is (probably) working, and can look at your bios and fool around, I wouldn't worry too much about installing an OS and drivers.


--Philip
Links 2.0 moderator

Thanks for the link.

Just out of interest, if I bought a motherboard, processor, ram etc from Canada, it should work in the UK right?...or would I run into any problems regarding power or anything?

I think Im going to get an early night, well if you can call 12.45am early ...lost lots of sleep recently....

Whatever you do, go for the flatron monitor. If you're spending a large amount of hours in front of your monitor you'll definitily appreciate the flatron. If you can fork out an extra few hundreds go for the flat screens as well.

People often forget about a decent monitor when buying a computer, but when I got a 17" LG Flatron with my latest machine it's made my life and my eyes a hell of a lot easier. No more headaches or bloodshot eyes .

The best thing I did was go to my local supplier and ask them to get in 5 of my selected monitors. I took the time to take each of them away and use it with my machine for the day. That's the only real way I could decide.

But I guess that's the benefit of local suppliers over a large national company. Local support, upgrades and all that. No decent local shops round your place? I live in the middle of Wales and we have 3 up here so you should find something half decent in a big city :-)

- wil

Wow they actually let you do that? Places don't do that around here because how do you sell an open box monitor afterwards? (You don't because no one wants to pay for a apparently used monitor for new price).


Adrian

Because my supplier actually buys large quantaties of any given products, they can ask a manufacturer for a number of monitors, hard drives, RAM etc just to test. They then send them back and either order a 1000 of them or say thank you and good night. I've just been fortunate to develop a good relationship with a few guys in the shop and they ahve extended these products to me for testing too, which is great.

Saying all this though. My local supplier is not an ordinary local supplier. It's the local University, and their IT team are in charge of say 9000 students and a massive IT budget. But they build all the computers in house and you can go in and order your custom built machine. Great fun! The machine I'm running now is a P4 1.3gz, 256SDRAM, 30gig disk, Matrox card, 1gig ethernet, cd-rw/dvd and the latest version of red hat, all for.... £650. Can't really complain, can I? :-)

My next addition to this system is most definitily a water-cooler to replace my fan. I'm a bit scared of these things leaking but it's definitily worth a try. Should be a fun activity for Christmas boxing day with a bad hangover trying not to spill any water onto my components!

- wil

Paul, we have had good luck with the Dell's generally, but prefer the OptiPlex line to the Dimension. The Optiplex generally come with onboard video, then with the video upgrade you can run 2 monitors. Just think, one monitor just for this forum and the other for your work. In reality the second monitor lets you see how your web pages look on a poor monitor. Also consider the Dell workstation line.