Re: Low end desktop for EE tasks?

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:44:49 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Folks,

Old iron horse here starts making creaking noises and it's tired. It
only needs to do CAD, Gerber viewing, newsgroup, light SPICE sub-circuit
sims (the kind that runs in a few seconds). IOW, I am replacing the
grunt works PC.

Replacement should be <$500 sans monitor (won't give up my CRT, no way).
And absolutely no Vista which excludes most lines. Anyone's got
experiences with these lines?

Dell Vostro (desktop): Windows XP. 1GB RAM which is nice. No parallel
port which ain't very nice, and the card from the old one won't fit I
guess. Around $350.

HP Compaq DX2250: Windows XP. Has parallel port which is nice. 250MB
RAM, well, that ain't cutting it. Price seems to pop right up if you
deviate from pre-config. Otherwise around $350 as well.

Are you up for building your own? You can get a mobo, cpu, memory,
hard drive, and perhaps a new power supply and, maybe, stick it in the
old case. You may need a new video card since AGP mobos are hard to
find for the modern flavors. If you need a new video board, get a dual
monitor version. Nice to have data sheets open on the secondary
monitor and CAD on the primary monitor. Mailorder from newegg.com. The
dual-core cpus are the way to go if you have programs that can use the
multiple cores.

Mark
.

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