[thelist] computers

build it yourself....
packaged machines have attractive pricing with the following deficits.
to keep the price down the
sound, video, modem, and are on the motherboard.
one dies, toss out the baby with the bathwater...
when your machine crashes you will be spending a lot of time at the mfg.
site downloading all of the drivers to make everything on the mother board
live again...


get a big box with lots of space..
motherboard with upgradable BIOS
chips faster than 400mz. are nice but not required unless you plan on doing
a lot of spread sheet recalculation, databasing, or graphics...

memory
at least 128 mb of fast ram

the visual bit
17" monitor -.28 dot pitch
video card at least 8mb of onboard video memory
(screen redraws are dependant on loading video refresh off the processor)

the noise bit.
sound card and speakers
(i am tone deaf and don't listen to tunes while i work so someone else will
need to guide you here)

modems
56k
you can always upgrade to cable,ISDN, DSL ect.
but a modem will get you through times of no connectivity with other
services.

Zip drive..Internal!
essential to backup data
100mbs are standard 250s are nice but the portability of data becomes harder
as the installed base of 250s is not that large

harddrives
multiple drives or multiple partitions
harddrives are cheap enough that you can go either way
with multiple partitions you can seperate the data from the os
with muliple drives you can mirror your data and with the BIOS change the
boot drive....

if you use SCSI interface you can daisy chain 7 drives
remember getting the big box?

IDE allows you 4
hardrive 1
CD 2
CDRW 3
ZIP 4
ide is bullet proof and is slower than SCSI

keyboard...generic keyboards 101 keys
adding a feature rich keyboard is just one more layer of software to go bad

pointing devices
get a track ball.
stays in one spot and you already know how to use a mouse
(microsoft trackballs are Not recommended-they are read hard to keep clean)

OS
windows 98 First edition
or NT 4.0 with Service pack 4
service pack 5 will do ugly things.

yes you still need a 3.5 floppy for some things..

you should be able to build the box for about 900-1100 bucks
with all the toys,