Bagpuss wrote:

Heh £199 for a 233 Mhz machine, looks like a urine extraction
exercise.

Yeah... it's quite sad really. One of my housemates ordered a similar
albeit marginally better machine (15" monitor, 128MB RAM, 8.4GB disk,
~500MHz)... I persuaded him to cancel it and offered to build him one.

Ebuyer have the MSI 745 Ultra motherboard for ~25, an Athlon for ~30,
128MB RAM for ~20 (sure that's not much now, but it's easy to upgrade
later), CD-writers for ~20 and large hard disks for ~40.

Amazing how easy it is to build a vastly better machine for the same kind
of money.

For £25 I'm delighted with the MSI 745, I've built two systems with it,
one runs FreeBSD 4.8 and is a server (very stable), and the machine I
built for my housemate runs XP which seems fine as well. And at that price
I don't care if it breaks, it's pretty much disposable.

Cheers,
Chris Howells