[ale] System advice for a newbie

[James P. Kinney III]

On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 10:05, Tim Watts wrote:
> Good Morning,
> 
> I want to get a new system and put Linux on it. I'm basically looking 
> for general advice on purchasing a new system targeted for linux. The 
> goal is general use and fun.
> 
> Some of the systems I'm looking at have integrated network and video on 
> the mother board (e.g HP Pavilion a700n). I've had problems in the past 
> with finding drivers for proprietary or off the wall adapters. Short of 
> doing a BYOS I'd like to avoid these kind of problems.
> 
> Any experience on how to avoid these and other problems before buying? 
> Anyone hit a wall with integrated adapters? What's been your experience?
> 
My $0.02:

Avoid the big names that advertise on tv like the plague. To pay for
that ad, they have to cut corner elsewhere. HP makes disposable boxes.
If the floppy disk fails, throw out the box as it self destructs in
about a month. Ditto for Dell, Gateway and Compaq personal desktop PC's.
They are all mostly crap. The motherboards are usually not industry
standard screw spacing so you can't drop in a new Tyan or Soyo when the
original one dies. They are engineered for an anticipated lifetime of 2
years.

Visit Tom's Hardware and read the reviews on motherboards. Most of new
intergrated boards can use a seperate video card, Nic, and sound. Most
have bios settings to turn them off.

I spec machines for build from places like Monarch Computer. It's is
very nice to be able to go stand face to face with the seller if there
is a problem. In the $65k of machines I have built from Monarch over the
past 2 years or so, I have only had one problem with a bad RAM module
and they went "Hmm. Bad RAM. That can be a pain. Here's another. Sorry
'bout that." At some other local build shops, I have had issues with
warranties not be honored as a part gets near the end of the warranty. 

Monarch also has a great listing of desktop machines they _know_ run
Linux since they will install it for you (Nah! Do it yourself. All they
do is an NFS mount netload of Fedora.) Their cheapest Linux desktop is a
pretty decent lowend machine. 

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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