I'm a true believer in building my own but this spring I needed a tower (with the idea it would just be a server) and didn't want to spend either a lot of time or money so I got a refurbished Dell P4 2.8HT for $340 bucks ($400 with high Cali tax and shipping). It didn't have much on it and I could have picked up the same machine with various LCD monitors for $500-$600.
I figured it would be limited and probably too noisy to leave running but I was shocked by how quiet it is. (Well, mostly. It was a "scratch and dent" and one of the drivebay covers on the front seems to get a little oscillation going sometimes. I stuck some tape across it and that seems to work for the most part.)
It does have an integrated video (with shared memory) as well as an integrated SoundBlaster chip.
Impressed by how quiet it was I finally decided to make it my primary, taking a little weight off my hard-working Dell notebook (a Pentium M, about two and 1/2 years old... it's been a little trooper... out almost every workday for about 2 years... finally bought a new battery and it's back up to, like, 5 hrs of battery life).
I slapped a Firewire PCI card in it, tossed my Echo Mia from my old, long abandoned P3 tower in it, and hooked up my MOTU 828mkII via FW, as well (I always feel naked without at least THREE audio interfaces in my PCs
) and it works absolutely fine.
As others have noted -- when you buy a PC from one of the big vendors like HP, Compaq, Dell, eMachines, etc, you really HAVE to get rid of the incredible mountain of CRAPWARE they put in them (you know, AOL offers, dumb ass wizurds, media player "loaders" -- most of it all designed to put someone's logo in your systray [the little icon area typically at the right end of the taskbar].)
My new tower came with 68 background processes running. I was able to turn off 40 of them just like that... it was like getting a big hardware upgrade... just like that. (You can get tweaking instructions at
www.MusicXP.com and
www.tweakXP.com )
One last thing -- my machine came with Win Media Center Edition on it.
WMCE came out recently and, as such, has not been tested and approved by a fair number of hardware and software vendors. For that reason many of them do not officially support WMCE.
But from my reading, I found that, for the most part, WMCE is nearly identical to XP Pro -- with the exception of the removal of some enterprise level networking functions (the IIS server -- a new 'personal' version of which is available for free from MS as part of their free Visual Studio Express developement suite) AND the addition of a "soft" DVR and some other media center junk -- which you should probably remove as part of your optimization regimen. (There are, as I recall, only two WMCE services you need to turn off using MSConfig -- and they're easy to spot because they have Media Center in the names.) Once you turn them off you can't run the WMCE DVR and whatnot but you likely don't care anyhow since you probably won't have a video input on it.
I would NOT sit on my hands waiting for equipment manufactuers to issue certifications for WMCE, though. It's seen as an "end of cycle" slipstream version update... with Vista coming soon (early next year... maybe) everyone's scrambling to be ready for that. I guess. (Not me. You'll have to pry XP out of my cold, dead fingers. Rescaling graphics engine? What has that ever done for the world? The "swoosh" is about the only thing I can think of and I'm so sick of that freezing in the middle on the G4 iMac I sometimes use at a clients.)
Anyhow, a modest machine will always be a modest machine, but you may be pleasantly surprised by just how much they can do nowadays. I know I was.
good stuff! Okay guys...I really (really) appreciate the feedback.
