{"id":3998,"date":"2007-06-04T10:36:23","date_gmt":"2007-06-04T14:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/06\/04\/computer-pricing\/"},"modified":"2007-06-04T10:36:23","modified_gmt":"2007-06-04T14:36:23","slug":"computer-pricing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/06\/04\/computer-pricing\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Pricing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So a coworker\/friend is toying with starting an Internet cafe overseas. It looks like OSs such as Knoppix and Ubuntu are somewhat common in those setups, partially because they&#8217;re free, and partially because they&#8217;re easier to lock down.<\/p>\n<p>So I went to Dell&#8217;s site, and began playing around with their configuration utility, trying to put together the cheapest machine possible. I figure we need like a 700 MHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and a CD drive. A hard drive is nice, but not necessary. (In fact, more secure.) My findings:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>The system ended up costing $529, but you can lease it for $16\/month. (This may actually be beneficial in this situation.)<\/li>\n    <li>The cheapest processor I could find was a Sempron 3400+, but the website never defines what this is. Knowing a little bit about computers, the only thing I&#8217;m able to tell you is that it&#8217;s almost certainly slower than 3,400 MHz.<\/li>\n    <li>&#8220;Windows Vista Home Basic&#8221; is the cheapest OS I could select. (They apparently sell certain PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu&#8230; I&#8217;ll have to try to find them.)<\/li>\n    <li>Only having 512 MB didn&#8217;t surprise me, but I didn&#8217;t expect a 160 GB hard drive to be the smallest.<\/li>\n    <li>Remember the old days when a CD-RW was the sign of a pricey system, and if you could read DVDs on it, too, it was cutting-edge? Now I had the choice between that and a DVD burner.<\/li>\n    <li>No speakers are included. Given that it&#8217;s for an Internet cafe, I think this may be a good thing.<\/li>\n    <li>I deviated from my &#8220;cheap as possible&#8221; plan and sprung for a 13-in-1 card reader for $20 or so, figuring it&#8217;d come in handy in an Internet cafe.<\/li>\n    <li>The 56kbps modem is basically free. I removed it, but it didn&#8217;t take anything off the price, so I included it again. Better safe than sorry?<\/li>\n    <li>MS Works 8 comes &#8216;free&#8217; with this install. No one likes MS Works, but I digress.<\/li>\n    <li>1 year of in-home service is included. Maybe I shouldn&#8217;t have gone with the &#8220;Consumer&#8221; machines.<\/li>\n    <li>It includes Yahoo! Media Jukebox and 6 months of AOL. Two things we&#8217;d get to uninstall as soon as we took delivery of them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Cynical rants about that stuff aside, though, it amazes me what you can get these days. I was reading through the circulars, and there are a lot of $800 laptops that can smoke any of my current machines. It&#8217;s hard to buy hard drives under 160 GB. (OTOH, it&#8217;s hard to buy hard drives over 160 GB for laptops&#8230;)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So a coworker\/friend is toying with starting an Internet cafe overseas. It looks like OSs such as Knoppix and Ubuntu are somewhat common in those setups, partially because they&#8217;re free, and partially because they&#8217;re easier to lock down. So I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/06\/04\/computer-pricing\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}