How to buy a cheap computer

Computer pricing has come to this: For just $330, you could recently buy an eMachines PC with a CD-RW drive, plus a 17-inch monitor, plus a Canon color inkjet printer. This Circuit City package may have been a loss leader (and the quoted price is after $300 in rebates), but the fact is, PCs are long past being luxury goods and now border on impulse buys. With retail prices in the $500 range for complete systems (and sale prices often much lower), how could you go wrong? Well, you might end up buying much less computing power today than you will want in a few months or a year. But if all you want is a word processor, e-mail and a way to browse the Web, todays crop of $500 machines should suffice.

What they lack, however, is horsepower. Random-access memory, or RAM -- a lubricant that helps a computer run quickly -- is minimal. And the processor is a weaker cousin of Intels Pentium 4, so youll have only the bare minimum for Windows XP. When you run several programs at once, speeds may begin to lag noticeably. And dont expect top-of-the-line word-processing and spreadsheet software.

There are other limitations. Need a big hard drive to hold your digitized vinyl collection or loads of digital family videos? Forget it. Youll get only 40 to 80 gigabytes of storage. Theres also no separate graphics card with the muscle to let you blast space aliens at the highest resolutions. And although ads for these cheap systems often tout a "flat screen" monitor, thats just a sneaky way of making a cathode-ray-tube (picture-tube) monitor sound like a sleek LCD.

Given the constraints, we scaled back our expectations of what these machines could be expected to handle. Of the four we tested, three were $500 Windows-based machines. The fourth was from Apple Computer. Each comes with a drive that plays and burns CDs, and plays DVDs (but doesnt burn them).

Never one to compete in high techs bargain basement, Apple nonetheless recently introduced the $500 Mac mini, a petite machine that is roughly the size of a cigar box. The catch is that the mini comes without a monitor, keyboard, mouse or speakers. To outfit the Mac mini, figure youll spend another $170 for very basic peripherals -- equivalent to those that come with the Windows machines.

http://www.electrocomputerwarehouse.com