wrote:
> Misery loves company. Clearly it pays off to buy
> quality hardware.
> Now to find the best quality, I suppose it is highly
> correlated with
> price?
Sometimes Yes, sometimes No. I seem to recall a time
(one of the earliest Comdex shows) when a Panasonic
1.2 FDD cost around $100. retail. Before FDDs went
the way of the Dodo (except for some odd folks like us
!), you could buy a reasonably good 1.44 FDD for under
10 bucks, new. Over time, many components tend to
become commoditized. Margins drop, prices *really*
drop. This has happened not long ago, f'rinstance,
with DVD burners. You can get OEM versions of the
latest Pioneer or LiteOn burners at the Pomona show
for under 50 bucks. Since the Pioneers are considered
among the very best, and tend to last quite awhile,
that's kind of a steal, IMO. You can still go for a
retail boxed Plextor burner if you like, at closer to
$200. It will have a better warranty, an extra
faceplate (so you don't have to choose between black
or beige), and bundled s/w you probably don't need.
But it won't outperform the Pioneer in ways that
matter.
To be more specific than I was in the earlier post,
there are a few things I won't compromise on. If a
power supply blows, it can take a lot of other stuff
with it. Good quality memory is important. The
HDD(s) are important. I want the 5 year warranty
models, because I think there is some correlation to
how long they are expected to last. The mfr. probably
wouldn't do that, if they didn't have a certain
confidence in their product. Maybe it's a holdover
from what I saw with SCSI HDDs, but I have very little
confidence in the production lines in China, when it
comes to something like a HDD. When I buy Ultra-ATA
100s, as I have for the Shuttle and for outboard USB
enclosures, I went for not just the 5-yr. warranteed
Seagates, but I check the box for source: Singapore or
Thailand much preferred, in that order. I would not
cut corners with any of these things. There are
plenty of good motherboards around, though. Go for
the features you want at a price that makes sense to
you, but stay away from the off-brands most of us have
never heard of.
To follow up on what Tony was saying about MWave, and
since it seems that you want someone like that to do
the system building for you, I think it very possible
that they would be amenable to your specifying and
maybe even providing a number of the components, if
you can obtain them at better prices.
Jordan
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