[ILUG] Good for hardware?

[Ronny Bangsund]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2002 at 07:03:03PM +0100, Paul Linehan wrote:
> I'm planning to make up my own PC (now that prices
> have fallen NOT!!!).
*snippage*

I bought mine last year this time, back when I was employed ;)
It's probably bordering on antique by shop standards, but a Duron
750 is not a bad thing..

I found the staff at Maplin fairly knowledgable; they've got a few
people there who actually know what they're talking about. Their RAM
and CPU prices were good before, and motherboards might be, too.

IT Direct often have the best prices on other components.
Not the most clued staff, although I think they've got a guy
from South Africa who's got many clues to rub together :)

Peats are often very expensive, but check prices there, still.

Those are the ones I know. My current computer is pieced together
from bits  bought in the above shops, plus an older harddrive (IBM IDE)
I brought with me from Norway. The monitor is a Sony Trinitron 17" I
got cheap from PC World(!). The latter place actually is starting to
introduce bulk hardware; their prices are finally coming down!

For instance, 128MB PC-133 RAM at 25 quid, and good fans for 8-15 quid.

Run back and forth between the places mentioned, and write down all
prices you can find ;)

Minimum equipment (from scratch):
Case: big, 4 5.25" bays and a 300W powersupply
Mouse or trackball, keyboard (USB or PS/2? Choose..)
CD-ROM or DVD (suggestion: AOpen slot-in DVD, which really is a Pioneer)
Harddrive (set an amount to pay, and buy what you can get for that)
Motherboard+CPU+RAM (all three vary, depending on choice - the latest
Durons and Athlons beat Intel, not only because they're cheap)
Monitor (Avoid any brand that also sells computers . Sony rock..so do
a few other brands; scan.co.uk might suggest a few good brands)
Soundcard (No choice there, really; Live! or the newer Audigy)
Graphics (Personally, I'm an NVidia fan, but ATI still impress -
GeForce2+3 is easiest to get working in Linux, and the drivers is the
same as in windows)

Additional cool stuff:
Internal ZIP drive (very useful for All Your Stuff(tm))
CD-burner (I'd personally never want anything but SCSI)
SCSI adapter (start buying those expensive drives and see why they
really are expensive - two drives at 40MB/s in RAID-0 means the same
as one drive at 80MB/s - add more as you desire speed ;)

Well, that's enough wibble for now. This is Ireland. Save as much
money as you can. Not the cheapest place in Europe :/

(I could buy 256 megs of RAM in Norway for 20 quid half a year ago)