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More Bang for the buck!Oct 13 '99 Write an essay on this topic.When the air conditioner leaked water all over my girlfriend's laptop I was teh lucky one who got to help her pick out a new(albeit inexpinsive computer). All she needed was a computer to get on the internet and wright papers for college so I thought for for $500 dollars I couldn't go wrong right? Actually I was! The machine runs great after only two inexpensive additions. It came with a 333 Intel Celeron processor. As you may or may not know there is very little difference between a Celeron and a PII chip. The difference is in the cache on the chip, the celeron has less. Does this effect very much? No. The internet doesn't use the cache nor does most software. Microsoft Word does as does Excel But both run fine for small projects (17 pg term papers) etc... Chances are if you need a high preformace system you are probably not reading this review. It also came with a 5X DVD and a 4mb ATi Rage Mach 64 and 32mb of ram. For $40 i upgraded the ram to 96 meg and picked up a Voodoo 2 1000 PCI at Best Buy (like circut city, compUSA or whatever you have in your area) for only $20 after rebate. I have yet to find a game to throw at it that it does not run well. 3D intensive games like Half-Life run well at 640X480 in openGL (it used to run well in 800X600 until I downloaded new device drivers for my video card). The naysayers will tell you the are bad because everything is built into the motherboard. This is true. I personally would not buy one because of this fact but that is because I'm majoring in a high-tech field and top-of-the-line is the only thing that will truly santisfy me. But for the average compter is not going to have any desire to upgrade his sound or graphics because he does not need to for programs that are not games. The computer does have two open PCI slots and 2 USB ports (one conviently up front). So if you want to put a cable modem in or a pass through graphics card is is possible. Over all I highly recomend this PC to the non-PC avids. It WILL santisfy the majority of peoples gaming and computing needs. If you want a highly upgradable computer you are going to have to spend more.  |
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