Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic :: I forgot to mention

[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]The machine I am typing this on is a 2.2 Ghz Dell Optiplex 740, with an AMD 64-bit processor running Windows XP Professional 32-bit, operated as a tower (the DVD drive accepts disks sideways but they work fine). I made some adjustments later, I pulled the 80 gig drive and replaced it with an $89 2 trillion byte drive, and also upped the memory from 500 meg or 1 GB (whichever it had when I bought it) to 3. Runs anything I throw at it, from Half-Life to Starcraft 2. I found a SATA Blu-Ray burner - not just a Blu-Ray reader but also writes Blu-Ray, DVD and CD - for $100. I bought the original about a year ago from Micro Center for just around $200. I will have to replace it eventually if I want to run the latest Duke Nukem, that requires a dual-core 64 or better, and I can get a refurbished dual core machine - same model, a Dell Optiplex GX 740 - with the following features for $230: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 2GB DDR2-400 RAM 750GB Hard Drive DVDRW Drive NVIDIA Quadro NVS 210S 10/100/1000 Network A brand new machine, a Dell Inspiron 560, is about the same (bigger hard drive) but costs $349 (it's discounted from list price of $469) with the following stats: Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor E6700 Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) 2GB DDR3-1333 RAM 1TB 7,200RPM Hard Drive 16x DVD±RW Drive 19-in-1 Media Card Reader Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD 10/100/1000 Network So even at new prices, unless your gaming needs far exceed ordinary desktop computers, a new machine or even a refurbished machine, which already works, then upgrade it as needed, might be less expensive (and more likely to work without problems) than building a computer from scratch. Examples from <a href="http://www.microcenter.com">Micro Center's website</a>; they're not a large chain, they only have about 20 stores or less across the country. By luck they have two here in the DC area, they had the one in Vienna, VA for 20 years then opened another new store about 20 miles away (and much closer to me) in Rockville MD after Comp USA, which had the site, went belly up in Chapter 11. [/quote]