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Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu
For example, you can now buy a cute little Apple Mac Mini (1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 40GB hard drive, 256MB RAM, and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW optical drive) for under $500. Add an industry standard monitor, keyboard, and mouse (all of which you or your department may already have), plus whatever application software you'll need to buy, and you're all set to go for a fraction of what you might previously have paid for an entry level Apple (see http://www.apple.com/macmini/ ).
What if you prefer or need a desktop PC running Windows? At the time this article was written, the Dell Small Business website (select "Small Business" from http://www.dell.com/ ) was offering Dell Dimension 2400 PCs (Celeron 2.4GHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, XP Home Edition) starting at just under $300 (including a monitor as part of the current promotion). In my opinion, that's an amazingly low price.
Given that sort of rock-bottom pricing, particularly if you're running an aging PC with Windows 3.11, Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, or some other version of Windows that's no longer supported, you really should be thinking about replacing it. As systems get increasingly "long in the tooth," catastrophic hard drive failures become more likely, and security patches may no longer be routinely issued for your operating system.
One caution: If you are a power user, be careful how incremental adjustments to budget systems such as these can add up. If you start with a deeply discounted configuration or one with limited expandability and begin adding this or tweaking that, you may quickly find yourself paying more than if you had purchased a more suitable system to begin with. Be sure you understand the niche that these budget systems can fill, and limit their selection to times when that's all that's needed.