On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 12:55, Peter Christensen wrote: > My five-year-old Gateway Pentium 200 MHz died recently. (It won't boot from > the hard drive or a rescue disk, and it won't go into bios-setup mode.) I > don't think it's fixable, and anyway, it was so slow that it's probably time > to replace it. Temporarily I'm using a borrowed computer with Win95. Yuck! > > For my next computer I want to make sure that everything is compatible with > Linux. I searched this list and found a few posts about buying computers. > They were a little old (one or two years), so I'm wondering if the situation > has changed. A few people recommended the AMD Athlon processor over > Pentiums. And Matrox for video, Soundblaster or Ensoniq for sound. Any > thoughts on this? > > I've heard that computers nowadays are built with the cheapest possible > components, so I was wondering if building it myself would be a good idea. > It might not be much cheaper than buying one from Dell or Gateway, but if > the result was a better quality machine it might be worthwhile. So far I've > only had to replace broken components in my Gateway, such as the hard drive > and CDrom, also added memory. Building a computer would be a challenge, but > I think I'd enjoy doing it...
In addition to "buy" or "build from scratch", there is a middle way: buy a bare bones system (mobo installed in case with maybe a CPU), and then you install everything else. This is the way I prefer to go. -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ron Johnson, Jr. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | | Jefferson, LA USA http://members.cox.net/ron.l.johnson | | | | Spit in one hand, and wish for peace in the other. | | Guess which is more effective... | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
