Favorite computer?

[Moderator BobC]

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RIP

I had a Dual Pentium III SuperMicro tower server with 4gb server memory, on board USB 1.1, Radeon AGP graphics, Fast Wide Adaptec SCSI, and Cheetah 10,000 rpm drives.

I built it in 1997 as a duplicate of a customer’s main server to be able to rescue them quickly if their system ever went down, and when it was newer in the late 90’s I mostly used it for running Win/98 SE to play Star Wars Pod Racer and Sports car GT. In the 2000’s I added 3 dual nVidia video cards and 6 flat screens and used it every day, eventually running Debian on it with the 6 screen configuration (none of the other distros tried could handle the screen setup). Eventually the video cards were no longer supported, and I replaced them with a Radeon AGP card when I was testing antiX 21 with it. Last year the battery kept losing power and I tried to replace it, but it would never boot again after that.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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@BobC: Now that you mention it, when I left DEC and started doing contract work, another UNIX development engineer also left and we worked on one of our early contracts together.

At lunch we were talking about building our own PC using individual parts. Since my hands are not skilled in assembly I asked him to do it for me. I paid him for the parts and a little extra for his time – and maybe a few lunch meals or dinner.

It was an unbranded desktop. That’s one of my better ones too; I moved on mainly to have a newer system and multiple disk drives around 2000-2001 with the temporary Compaq desktop as an interim. I switched systems often then because system speeds were greatly improved and I had the income to get them! Not so today!

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I have to also admit that when I had a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop system, it provided me with very good service, it was expandable, so I added a second disk. I very much prefer their Dimension desktop line to their old Optiplex design.

I’m not sure who has good desktop models these days; it’s been a long time since I’ve used a new one; I do have a Hewlett-Packard 5000 series desktop in the corner; they’re decent devices. IBM, before they sold their personal systems to Lenovo, had first class desktop and laptop models. They were not necessarily the absolute fastest systems, but they were always well engineered, had a solid feel to them, and they had reliable parts, good to very good keyboards (after all, IBM stands for International Business Machines, and they started out with the best professional grade typewriters).

I’ll look some more systems and comment on any that I’m still familiar with.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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It looks like Hewlett Packard has an affordable HP ENVY and Pavilion line of desktop computers;
Dell has an affordable collection of desktop Inspiron, Optiplex, and various “D” series computers;
Acer uses the Aspire name for both laptops and desktops.

By the way, there are plenty of refurbished and other “used” desktop systems; my suspicion is that if you can find them, they may be relatively easy to obtain for a relatively low price compared to laptops with equivalent capabilities.
I saw a few “refurbs” advertised in the $100-300 price range, quite a few very functional (and reasonably powerful) desktop models in the $300-600 range.

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Brian Masinick

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