Been building my own computors since 1993. The only name brand computoer I ever bought was a KLH 386sx-16 from Sam's Club in 1991 (or so). I bought it with a 40 meg hard drive so I would NEVER run out of hard drive space LOL.

Since then I have built AMD 486's, Cyrix-based pentium-class machines, AMD pentium-class machines, and a three AMD Athlon machines. Obviously I have a grudge against Intel. I guess I just like it when an underdog performs as well as the big dog.

I have always used premium parts. Recently, I decided I needed a new machine and didn't have the time (or desire) to shop for and buy the parts, and make them all play nice together. I went into the Office Depot to buy office supplies (there's a shock), and out of curiosity walked over to the computer aisle. They had three machines on closeout and the display models were all that were left. I bought one for $650 with a $150 rebate, total $500. Get this, its an HP Pavilion a820n Pentium 4, 3.2 ghz 800 mhz hyperthreading, 512 meg of RAM and a 160 meg hard drive. Plus it's got the numerous card reader thing on the front for digital camera card. two fron USB ports and a fron firewire port as well as fron multimedia ports. One CD-Rom and one DVD/CD writer with the Lightscribe direct disc labeling. It's blazingly fast.

Folks, I couldn't build this machine for triple the price. Yes, I realize I've gone over to the Intel dark side, and it's an HP to make matters worse. Gotta tell you though: it's rock-solid stable. Most of my machines in the past, could run for a few days before becoming unstable and needing a reboot. I have always blamed Bill Gates for that. This machine has been running for a month without so much as a glitch.

Yes, I feel like a sellout. Yes, I feel cheap. Yes, I deserved to be kicked out of the computer building geek's club of America. But the feeling of knowing that the computer will be running along fine the moment I sit down is worth it.

My name is Ed . . . and I've sold out to the big conglomerates.

:D :D

I know what you mean Ed. Most of the time now days I can find a machine with same capbilites or more cheaper than what I can build. The big thing in much of the builds is Operating System and apps software (to be legal, which we all are of course). I have a gateway, my first name brand since early 90's, like you Office Depot offered a deal I couldn't pass up.

HP is ok. I just don't like all the bloatware they come with pre-installed. They start a dozen processes at boot. Pisses me off.

That's a great deal for sure. There's nothing wrong with P4's, I don't understand your thought process on that one. The pre-prescott chips smoked a lot of AMD's chips simply because they ran a ton cooler and you could overclock excessively with the stock HSF combo it came with. The P4e's ran a little hotter.

If I had $600 handy, I'd go buy one of the AMD64 FX chips with that cash though :)

I just like the underdog, that's why I ran AMD's and Cyrix chips for so many years.

Cyrix...whew, there's an underdog for you.... :lol:

Remember when you could drop almost any chip in any computer? Hehe... I remember when Intel patented all of their chip slots....bastards...life was so easy before that.

AMD is so far from underdog these days! I think we need a third vendor making chips though.

There WAS a time (short) when Cyrix had the fastest CPU on the market. Wasn't particularly stable, but I could identify with that!

Intel still has the upper hand over AMD though. I have come to believe that the lack of stability in some of my past machines was attributable to the AMD processors. All of my company computers are Intel processors and they are rock solid.

I was explaining to a friend of mine that the fact that I had to reboot my old machine may be a matter of my buying the parts that are supposed to be compatable but not really thoroughly tested. For instance, I would research and buy the hottest video card, sound card, motherboard, etc. I would put them together and some machines I built over the years would be fairly stable and some would be a little shaky. They would all be super-fast. I think companies like HP/Compaq, Gateway, Sony, Dell, etc. are able to test extensively and insure that the machines are stable befor going to market. I have noted that on most of HP's machines the video card compatability list is very limited. Not that I think other cards WON'T work, but the cards they list are PROVEN STABLE in their machines. HP uses Nvidia almost exclusively for their video cards. I've never been terribly impressed by Nvidia, but that's what they feel is the most stable in their machines.

I can't help but feel the same way about AMD. And most of my problems that arose from instability seemed to be heat related.

I know for a fact that Dell outsources to major manufacturers to make special revisions on their hardware like vid cards and stuff. Example: A few years back, Dell used to put 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 cards in their systems. The 3dfx part number was '3000', Dell's special revision was the 3000D. There were a few minor differences on the hardware itself ... still made by 3dfx and still a Voodoo 3 3000 vid card, but ... Dell's revision built for higher compatibility.