🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <40obve$754@male.EBay.Sun.COM> Bob Morrisette,
writer@sabu.ebay.sun.com writes:
>Get real! No one puts a PC together from parts bought at
>different places. That method will not save money. You can buy
>a multi-media P75 system for about $2K with monitor. What type
>of Mac can you buy for $2K?

  People do this.
  It does save money.
  I do this.  So do some other people I personally know : 
Tash Hepting, Kyle Haight, Douglas Dike, Ryan Koga, to name
a few.  Of course, we're all pretty much technogeeks, but if
there are a few of us here there are more of us elsewhere.

  I also make it my habit of piecing together low-end systems
from used parts, acquired at extremely low prices.  I have a
few complete 386 systems sitting in the corner over there, 
and none of them cost me more than $50 to put together,  One
of them cost me less than $30.  I have a 486DX50 system that
cost me about $400 to put together, and a 486DX33 that cost
about the same.  I'm sure that a few years from now I'll be 
piecing together P90 and PPC601 systems for a few hundred 
dollars, too.

  If you just want to talk about new systems, there are three
places where I shop for new parts right now.  Sometimes there
are as few as two, or as many as five or six as the market 
wobbles.  My current system has had parts added and replaced
gradually over the years, all for dirt-cheap, until the only
parts remaining from the original is one of the floppy drives
and the case.  Even the power supply's been changed.  It's a
486DX2/80 with 1.3GB of SCSI-2 HD, 16MB RAM, 250W PS, 15" SVGA 
NI, and VLB SVGA 1MB video.  If I wanted to get the same system 
for free, all new parts from the case inward, (grabbing refs) 
I'd pay about (summing it up) $1728 plus tax by getting parts
from here and there and putting them together.  If I were to 
buy the entire system pre-assembled from just one place, and I
shopped around, I'd pay $1935 plus tax.  If I were to buy the
entire system pre-assembled from one of the no-brainer "we do
it all for you" joints like Fry's, I'd pay $2399 plus tax.

  So PC users can save quite a bit by shopping around, and save
a little more by collecting parts and building it themselves.
Doing so doesn't even void any warrantees.

  Mac users, on the other hand, don't have this option.  They
can only buy from one "no-brainer, we do it all for you" joint:
Apple.  And woe be to he who takes even a single screw from the
Mac's case..  Their warrantee goes up in smoke!  Bad deal.

  Also closed to Mac users is the option of putting together 
old parts from different Apple systems.  Apple has this nasty
habit of changing their hardware arch every 3 years or so.  :-/
We, on the other hand, can take parts out of a 286 box and plug
them into a 486 or Pentium box and have it all run okay. 

-- 
Bill Moyer <ttk@rahul.net>