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19990922: hardware specs (cont.)

>From: alan anderson <address@hidden>
>Organization: St. Cloud State
>Keywords: 199909211630.KAA00214 PC hardware specs

Alan,

>Could you provide the vendor for the above?

After sending you the hardware lists yesterday, I got the following from
Mike Schmidt:

 Also, due to a number of bungled orders, I wouldn't recommend
 AMEC any longer.

So, I will not be sending you the vendor contact information for the
dual 550 Mhz machines.  The vendor contact for the dual 450 Mhz machines
is:

The machine was bought through a company called Workstation Direct.  This
company has offices all over the country; we got ours through an office
in Denver.  The main reason we did this is that we knew one of the people
who was sorking there (he has since left) and trusted him.  The URL for
Workstation Direct is: http://www.wksdirect.com/

>Also, I will pass your message to my colleague; his name is Tony Hansen.
>I suspect he may email you with some additional questions.   Tony has been
>on our faculty about a year, and was the mcidas person at Augsburg College
>in MSP.

I remember Tony.

>Also, can you take orders for the machine you described at the end of your 
>message?  

Well, neither I nor Unidata is not in the business of putting together
machines.  I sent along the information so that you would be aware that
one can put together fully functional machines for very little money.
I did this for the machine I use at home and am very pleased with the
results.  The process I went through in putting that machine together
was:

o take an old, obsolete machine here at Unidata
o purchase a FIC VA503+ motherboard from TC Computers ($70)
o use a 200 Mhz Pentium processor that we had on hand; I since upgraded
  this to a 400 Mhz AMD K6-2 processor for $43
o purchase an ISA 56 Kb modem; ISA modems are not likely to be Winmodems
  so it was usable "right out of the box" in Linux and NT ($42.50)
o purchase an 8 MB 2x AGP video card based on the Intel 740 video chip
  ($39)
o purchase a 40x CDROM at Best Buy ($29.99 after rebate)

I was so tickled after upgrading to 400 Mhz that I decided to peruse
the Sunday advertising supplements to the Denver/Boulder papers and
add to it the cost of the motherboard and processor.

An especially good URL to remember if you decide that you might like
to try putting together a machine is that for PriceWatch (tm):

www.pricewatch.com

This site's only purpose is to scan the net looking for the cheapest
prices for a wide variety of equipment.  This is how I found that the
price of the AMD K6-2 400 had dropped to $43.  Four months ago the
same chip was almost $150; right now it is down to $41.

Tom
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