[olug] Advice on a white box builder

[Jeff Hinrichs]

Thank you all for you advice.
I did  recall the recent mail on local vendors but couldn't find it in the
archive yesterday.  The question was inspired by Dell.  Yesterday, I had one
of my, to be replaced, win95 boxen go belly up with a bad hard drive.  So I
spoke to the powers that be and we agreed that a hard drive swap was not
worth the effort since the machine was scheduled to go out of service.  Dell
Small Biz, had sent out an email the same day saying they had Dimensions
4200 w/ flat screen, cd burner and free shipping for 899.  I pop over to the
site and start to configure.  XP home/pro is the only choice for the OS.  So
I call them since I've seen this before but got them to install 2000.  They
decline and say that only XP home/pro can be installed on the Dimensions.
I'd have to go to an Optiplex that when configured similiary would cost the
same as the dimension (upgrade RAM to 512 and a copy of office) but NO
flatscreen, no free shipping making the cost about $600 more.  When I
complained they say, "Everyone is going to XP."  To which I said B.S.
Anyway, I've been doing biz with Dell since pentium-75's were the chip.  But
from time to time they become idiots and I go shopping.  I've got a dozen
IPaq desktops still in service when they did this last time 2 years ago.

Sorry for the M$ references but they are the client of choice for the
company currently.  I am replacing M$ servers with *nix as I go though :).

The systems I'm looking for are P4, 512MB, 20GB, NIC,USB, Win2K.   Anyone
bought something similiar lately? What did you pay?

Thanks,
Jeff


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