Today I will take a slight deviation into the world of computer hardware, I set myself a challenge an I must say I am rather happy with the results. My challenge was to design an build a workstation that I would be happy using without breaking the £200 mark leaving myself room to spare for a beer during the build and a Pizza during the OS confinguation. The trick in my mind is realising that although you might like the best hardware although you might like a quad core system with 8gb of ram as your workstation you don't need that much if all you are doing is Email, Word processing, web browsing and slight coding like PHP or any of the other scripting language's. The other trick is to source the parts from a supplier who has good customer service and best of all cheep hardware, my choice of provider was Aria.co.uk.
The hardware I chose:
- Arianet 8027 Black / Silver Midi Tower Case 350W, Quickcode: #33603, £19.87 inc. VAT
- Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L iG31, Quickcode: #33611, £40.04 inc. VAT
- Intel Celeron Dual Core E1200 1.6GHz, Quickcode: #30241, £39.04 inc. VAT
- Arianet 1GB PC2-6400 DDR2, Quickcode: #26111, £8.61 inc. VAT (I will be ordering two)
- Alps Black 1.44MB 3.5†Floppy Drive, Quickcode: #2436, £6.84 inc. VAT
- 160GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 8MB, Quickcode: #27006, £29.84 inc. VAT
- Samsung 22x SH-S223F DVD±RW, Quickcode: #31918, £14.89 inc. VAT
The total minus shipping is £168.83, this is far cheaper than any other workstation I have ever built, now I could go even cheaper buy skimping out an buying a DVD rom drive only or by dropping the floppy drive all together. I have left in a floppy drive when most people are forgetting them as to be quite honest I still use floppies a fair bit and some times it's better to use a floppy to back up that txt file or flash a older BIOS.
Now if you notice I have left the OS out of the pricing as to keep the price down you will either recycle your XP key from the side of your existing computer (not officially condoned by myself or Microsoft) or like I will be doing in this case using Linux! Yes I know it's not every ones cup of tea but it's more than capable I am a recent Linux to Windows convert as some of you may have read and after using a ungodly mix of distributions for the last 9 years I can live in any Linux distribution, but for newbies I will say use Ubuntu and if you where building this computer from scratch with no current computer that works you can order a disk to be delivered to your door from canonical for free.
I will point out that this system stands no real chance at running Vista (unless you count home basic) it is more suted to a XP enviroment but if you swapped out the processor with a slightly faster one you would be more than happy with this running Vista home or Vista business.
This would be a ideal system for a quick an dirty replacement for your main workstation or for a computer for the older or younger members of your family, or for a cheep second third or even fourth rig in your house.
