Shoping for a Cheap PC
Oct 01 '01
The Bottom Line With PC prices so low, it's a good time to buy a PC
In the past, if you wanted an average, up to date PC you’d either buy a $2,000 PC from a major manufacturer or knock off a couple hundred and get an off brand PC. But now, with the sluggish economy and dying PC sales, you can get a great PC for only a little over $1,000, which is a terrific bargain.
I’d recommend going to a store and checking out some PC’s (this eliminates Dell from the picture, but for a cheap PC I wouldn’t recommend them anyway). Try going to a Gateway country store. Before you go, make a list of what you want in the computer. For example, this was my list when I was testing out some manufacturers websites for the model PC (the website prices are almost always the same as the store prices):
At least a 1 GHz processor
At least 128 megabytes of RAM
At least a 17” monitor
At least 30 gigabytes of hard drive
Two speakers
A 16 megabyte video card
A CD-RW player
Any office suite
I then checked out Gateway, Micron, and Hewlett-Packard’s site and found those configurations (see end of article for links). I found all of them with at least these requirements hovering around $1,200. This is about what you’d want, but you should feel free to make any changes.
For example, if you were going to do video or graphics editing then you’d want more RAM, hard drive, and monitor. If you were going to do a lot of gaming, you’d want a bigger graphics card, speakers, monitor, and processor. If you want to do just word processing, light gaming, web surfing, and CD burning, then you could just upgrade the RAM because it would make everything go a little faster.
The vendors that I’d recommend buying from would be Gateway, Sony, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Micron. Yes, I did leave out Compaq because I don’t feel that they make very good systems. Note that in this article I didn’t discuss Macs, and that’s because you really only have one choice, the iMac, because the G4’s are too expensive and you don’t need all of that power.
Here are the links for all of the vendors:
Gateway -- http://www.gateway.com/home/products/hm_dtp_catalog.shtml
Dell -- http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/series_dimen_desktops.htm
Micron -- http://www.micronpc.com/smallbiz/store/desktops/product_overview.html
Sony -- http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/desktops/index.html
Hewlett-Packard -- http://hp-at-home.com/home/home2.html
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