[dba-Tech] Desktop recommendation

Others have made fine suggestions.  If you are considering building it
yourself, may I suggest the following...  It is a combination of hardware
that should give you decent performance at a reasonable price, plus put you
in a position of being able to upgrade the processor in the future.  Prices
were taken from Pricewatch.  You can probably expect to add a certain
percentage to account for shipping and choosing alternate dealers.  Out of
the following, I'd probably suggest upgrading the motherboard first.

$100 -AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton 2.167 GHz
      512K Cache 400FSB OEM
$ 60 -80.0GB EIDE HDD Western Digital
      7,200RPM 8MB Cache
$115 -1GB PC3200 DDR Memory 400MHz
$ 45 -Biostar/Amptron M7NCD, NVIDIA nForce2,
      Audio, Video, LAN
      (This is a decent chipset, but you can
      get better Motherboards)
$ 35 -ATX Mid Tower Case + 400W P4/AMD PW.
      11bay. Fit all Micro and ATX MB.
      Extra Mid Case Front USB2.0 and audio.
      thermal disp. and lights (selectable).
      Aluminum clr. Screwless for cards.
____
$355 -Grand Total


Mark





-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph O'Connell [mailto:joconnell at indy.rr.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 9:45 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: [dba-Tech] Desktop recommendation


I am looking for hardware suggestions and comments.

My primary development PC just lost its hard drive.  The boot sector is bad
so I cannot reformat it.  The PC is about 4 years old, so instead of
replacing the hard drive, I started lookin for "deals" on new computers.

Office Depot has an emachine for $370 that includes:
Celeron D Processor 330 (2.66GHz)
256MB DDR PC2700 memory
60 GB hard drive
DVD-ROM/CD-RW
8-in-1 memory card reader
17" flat screen monitor

For $100 the system can be upgraded to include
Celeron D340 Processor (2.93GHz)
512 MB memory
DVD-ROM and CD-RW

>From the Intel web site, I learned that the processor includes 256KB L2
cache and 533 MHz Front Side Bus.

Although this is not the fastest computer, it is quite a step up from the HP
Pavillion 733GHz Pentium that it will be replacing.

Does anyone have experience with emachine?  What is the difference between
Celeron and Pentium processors?  This seems like a terrific deal, am I
missing something?

The operating system is Windows XP Home.  I will replace it with Windows
2003 Terminal Server.  Any suggestions on how to configure the hard drive?
Multiple partitions?  If yes, what should each contain?

All suggestions/comments/ideas are greatly appreciated.

Joe O'Connell




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