Friday - June 13, 2008

PC Prices Dropping Again?

Even though the dollar may not be worth much right now, and I’ve heard rumors we might be in a recession, the prices of PCs seem to have come down again. I got a flyer in the mail from Dell, and they’re pushing a basic machine for $499. No monitor, but hey, if you’re reading this you don’t really need another one do you?

My PC is a Dell Dimension XPS 733r which dates from 1999. It has a 733Mhz Pentium, a 27Gb HD, and a 19” hi-rez CRT. I’ve got the memory maxxed out at 384Mb; that’s all it will hold. I’ve added a DVD burner/32X CD drive that replaced the 4X CD reader. It still has the original Sound Blaster card and the speaker system. This thing cost $2200 nine years ago.

Today, for less than one quarter of that price, you can buy a machine that runs 14 times faster, has 10 times the RAM (3Gb), 20 times the HD capacity - half a freakin Terabyte!!, and has a data bus that runs at least twice as fast. For $499. Amazing. Oh, and free shipping too.

Of course, to ramp things up a bit, you’ll want to spend $100 to upgrade to the next level of CPU, but that upgrade gets you a 1333Mhz data bus, a full third faster than standard. And another $60 gets you 4Gb of RAM that runs at a higher speed. And a decent stand-alone video card adds another $60. Which gives you a new bottom line of $729. For a smoking fast PC. All of this for $22 a month for 3 years. Hey, I’m still pretty impressed, even though this may not be the ultimate bang-for-the-buck deal out there.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/13/2008 at 11:23 AM   
Filed Under: • Computers •  
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