I really hate these cheap celeron based machines with onboard graphics. my old man bought a dell with celeron cpu 1.8Ghz, 128MB RAM and basic onboard 32MB intel graphics, onboard audio with 15" CRT monitor (was about a year ago) with XP home for £399. it's so slow it makes me nearly cry everytime i use it, it was bought to browse the internet and word processing which it does do, but slowly. its one of those those machines that your scared to click something incase it hangs for 10 seconds to think about it.
To try and speed it up i disabled all xp's fancy stuff, graphical rubbish and totally unnesessary (<- should have gone to school more often, is that spelt right?) services, services that shouldn't really be installed on an operating system designed for home use and it's still slugish.
So i though ok, it's only got 128MB RAM (graphics memory is not shared, luckily!), let's install another 256MB RAM (PC133 by the way), so i did, and although its better it still isn't great.
Now, if your still awake
, i have also got a PIII 866Mhz machine with 256MB PC 133 RAM, AGP x2 FX5200,and a PCI SB 128, cost me £1000 at the time (2001) and wasn't far of top of the range. (note: upgrades since purchase, extra 128MB RAM and replaced 32MB TNT2 with the FX5200 128MB(cheers ian)), the performance of this 3yr old machine with £70 worth of upgrades works superbly, never crashes, runs the internet and office apps smootly and with pace and will play Halo on medium to high settings.
If i tried to sell my PIII machine (which is in perfect working order) when my old man bought his celeron machine i could probably get £100 max for it including a 17" decent quality Dell branded monitor, so thats £399 for a PC that struggles loading office apps with a 15" monitor or £100 for a machine that that will quite happily do all the office and internet stuff and also play some quality games, what would you choose?
There used to be a rule when buying PC's that in my experience never failed, spend a £1000 on a machine from a reputable manufacturer and it will keep you going for at least 3yrs. The first year you'll have a top of the range machine that can play any game out, the second year it can play all the new games but with only half the detail and in the third year of it's life the machine's still useful as an office machine, and does the job very well, it will then continue 'till it dies. (just like the terminator!)
The way i see it is that machines that were being built up until around 2002 were good quality and were built to last because a computer then was seen as a piece of expensive equipment that was expected to last. Most of the machines that you buy in 2004 are put together as cheaply as possible with as higher spec as possible, thus they don't last as long. The specs you see at amazingly good prices might have a 2+ Ghz processor, 512MB RAM, 200GB Hard Drive, 256MB Graphics Card and 5.1 Surround Sound Audio. They're the popular specs they're the specs that people generally look for and compare when buying a PC. These machines may have the big seemingly impressive specs but when you look at the full specs with all the technical details (which manufacturers tend to hide) you'll first notice that the manufacturers of the equipment you've never heard of, the more detailed specs like the spin speed (RPM) or response time of a hard drive and the FSB and CAS Lantency of the RAM. An example, when i worked for Time Computers they sold a "top of the range" machine (cost circa £1200" witch included a AIW (All In Wonder) graphics card with 256MB of RAM where you could input TV to your PC and also output video, sounds great the graphics on this system was sold as new technology, (to bring this into perspective Time were selling this up until May 2004), the card that was in these machines was a ATI 9200 AIW, anyone that knows anything about computers will know that this card was used in the ice age to make the snow look prettier!, now Time Computers as a rule has pretty clueless customers when it comes to computers, so everyone that bought one of these machines thought it was great, that was until they iinstalled the latest ATI AWI software when they got an error message saying "no DVD decoder detected", this is an error message and generally Time customers ring technical support when they get any error msg (the best one was a customer calling when they were faced with the message "do you really want to shutdown windows?) anyway "no DVD decoder detected", so, when a customer rang up asking what this error message meant we had no choice but to explain that the new (at the time) ATI 9800 AIW graphics card includes a dvd decoder where as the top of the range ATI 9200 AIW doesn't, the arguments went on from there.
In todays economy as prices rise, eg, did a can of coke cost 60p 3yrs ago? (butty man at work now charges this, gave me a funny look when i commented on the price and he said "i was due a payrise!", cheeky b*****d.) why is it computers are going against everything else and getting cheaper? yeah ok the technology is getting cheaper, but IMO the quality of machines is getting cheaper as well. The problem is we don't expect computer equipment to last as long as a television for example. If a televison lasts 3yrs with out a hardware fault then why shouldn't a PC?
Originally basically what i'm getting at is why not sell PIII machines with 256MB RAM and a 64MB graphics card,
If i tried to sell my PIII machine (which is in perfect working order) when my old man bought his celeron machine i could probably get £100 max for it including a 17" decent quality Dell branded monitor, so thats £399 for a PC that struggles loading office apps with a 15" monitor or £100 for a machine that that will quite happily do all the office and internet stuff and also play some quality games, what would you choose?
There used to be a rule when buying PC's that never failed, spend a £1000 on a machine from a reputable manufacturer and it will keep you going for at least 3yrs. The first year you'll have a top of the range machine that can play any game out, the second year it can play all the new games but with only half the detail and in the third year of it's life the machines still quite useful as an office machine, and does the job very well, it will then continue 'till it dies.
The way i see it is that machines that were being built up until around 2002 were good quality and were built to last because a computer then was seen as a piece of expensive equipment that was expected to last. Most of the machines that you buy in 2004 are put together as cheaply as possible with as higher spec as possible, thus they don't last as long.
In todays economy as prices rise, eg, did a can of coke cost 55p 3yrs ago?, why is it computers are going against everything else and geting cheaper? yeah ok the technology is getty cheaper, but IMO the quality of machines is getting cheaper as well.
Basically what i'm getting at is why not sell PIII machines with 256MB RAM and a 64MB graphics card with a 17" CRT monitor for £399, i know thats what i'd rather have. if your gonna buy a cheap machine to do those office jobs, why have a machine that tries to be more than it is, get a machine that tells you exactly what it is and what it can do.
Just to finish off, you can get a second hand PIII Machine from any computer fair or on ebay and in my opinion is better than any of these cheap machines you can buy for under £100.
Think about it.
if that made sence i'm amazed, lol
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