Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]Check and see what's available from stores selling machines returned from terminated leases (or traded in on purchases of new equipment) that might be for sale. You can get a reasonably good, refurbished and cleaned machine for about 1/2 price or less. Plus you'll get XP Professional loaded on it as opposed to being dumped into Windows 7 (or worse, Vista). Micro Center here in the Washington, DC area does a lot of this, and their used computers are generally about as good as a new machine, half the price or less, plus you know it works because it's been up and running in regular service for a long time. You'll get a 90-day warranty and you can buy an extended warranty if you think you need it from SquareTrade for not much money. (A 1-year warranty on a $300 refurbished computer is about $70.) As for building your own computer, "been there, done that, got the T-Shirt." I don't have specialized high-end needs so nowadays any computer I can buy either refurbished or discontinued, or even a new machine, for less than it would cost me to build one (plus don't forget Microsoft Windows 7 is charged out to you at full price of around $150 as opposed to the true discounted price the manufacturer pays of about $50 or so.) But the computer I built back around 1995 was nice, it was a Pentium - I went a little beyond the curve instead of going with a 486 - and it was a turquoise blue case, quite attractive. There is nothing so exciting as getting a book on how to build a computer, installing the motherboard, hooking it to the case's power supply, installing the memory and drives, then booting it up for the first time and discovering you did everything perfectly. Then, of course, you suffer the ultimate punishment, what I call "the death penalty," in which you now have the pleasure of doing a brand new install of an operating system from scratch off CD (or now, DVD). But, like most people, I only had the death penalty inflicted upon me once, at least for that machine. I've had to suffer capital punishment many times because of machine rebuilds. I ran with my cyan colored machine for about 3 or 4 years until I had to upgrade for the next game I wanted that required beefier equipment. One thing I'll recommend staying away from is anything from a company called CTX. At the place where I used to work doing tech support, routinely, whenever someone called in that their monitor had died, it was <i>always</i> a CTX. It got so bad we realized the name stood for "Certified To eXpire." [/quote]