[ale] Do people still roll their own Linux desktops?

[Pat Regan]

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On 03/17/2010 08:57 AM, Michael Trausch wrote:
> I always build from NewEgg. Though my justification is more along the lines
> of, if I make a mistake and something dies I want to be able to replace it.
> Prefabs suck in that regard.

I've been running a laptop as my primary machine for quite a few years
now, so I haven't built much of anything myself lately.

A friend of mine who has been doing the same thing recently needed to
buy or build a pair of desktops.  We were coming out a bit cheaper on
the side of prefab machines.  We were coming in quite a bit cheaper when
he had to factor in Windows licenses...

We were shopping on the lower end of the spectrum.  Lower end dual core
and 2-4 gig of ram.  I'm pretty sure DIY starts to get much more cost
competitive as the performance goes up.

I remember the first PC I built.  It was an AMD 386DX 40 mhz replacing a
386SX 16mhz.  It was more of an upgrade, really, though.  I bought a
case, power supply, and motherboard.  The 4 meg of ram, the floppy
drive, hard drive, and video card all came out of the old machine.

I remember driving (which was new to me at the time) back to the
computer show (remember those?) to buy the case/ps after finding out
that the connector in the machine I had wasn't quite standard.  I
learned later that it probably had all the right pins but the connector
was had oddly shaped round pins.

That machine originally ran MS DOS 5, QEMM, and DESQview.  Two or three
years later it was running Slackware and a 1.2.13 kernel.  I remember
letting kernel compiles run overnight, 4 meg of ram made for a ton of
swapping during the build :).

I've also been running SMP on my home desktop since probably around
1999.  The same big honking heavy tower case held my Abit BP6 with dual
celerons and my Tyan Tiger MP with dual Athlon XP 1700s.  The dual
Athlon was replaced by a Core 2 Duo laptop, and I'm shopping around for
a Core i7 laptop to replace it right now.

I'm still using that big heavy tower case.  It is currently home to an
Athlon X2 3800 and 6 hard drives.  It is hooked up to my projector and
has the job of storing all my media.

Pat
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