That's because I have a job, unlike you.
Ow! That hurt me so bad. I wonder where I go for at least ten hours each weekday?
As for the workstation system. I said "desktop", and said that excludes laptops and servers. I should have added, that I don't use a workstation at home or office, so of course that is excluded too.
In modern terminology, a "workstation" is anything that's not a "server". You may notice that Microsoft sells Windows NT Server and Windows NT Workstation. While they don't sell Windows NT Home, you can use either at home without the world coming to an end or the police kicking down your door.
You also may note that in the Dell ad they call the first computer on the list a "mid sized desktop". How does that differ from the desktop that you're looking for? You're beginning to get shrill as you keep narrowing your definition of what you want to avoid each solution supplied to you. Your point has been lost: you can buy a machine from Dell that has Windows (even Windows 98 SE or Windows 95, check the customization) that does not come with either Works or Office and therefore Microsoft is not forcing Dell to place one or the other on every system they ship. It's just too damn bad for you if you don't happen to want that particular family of configurations.
So, do you use a workstation at home, Gerald Walls? How do you like it? Don't you think it's a bit of overkill?
Some people buy fast cars, others buy fast computers.
My primary home machine is a home-brew with an Asus P2B motherboard using a Celeron-300A overclocked to 450 MHz with 128 MB of memory, a 12 GB HD, a Creative Labs Dxr2 DVD and MPEG hardware decoder, a 4x2x8 CD burner, one 3.5 and one 5.25 inch floppy, a tape backup unit, a Sound Blaster PCI-128, and an ATI All-in-Wonder-Pro AGP Video/TV Tuner/Capture card, all in an Antec 300-Watt ATX full-tower case that you could beat on with a hammer. So, I guess it's a workstation. And yes, I like it, but I sure wish it were faster. It's a far cry from overkill. Oh, and a 19-inch Hitachi SuperScan Elite 751 monitor.
I have four other machines, a what-I-would-consider-barely-usable Pentium-133 for my wife (a piece of crap Packard Bell), an obsolete 486-DX4-75 running Linux as an Internet Connection Server (a home-brew Christmas gift to my parents replaced this piece of crap Packard Bell), a Pentium-200 laptop, and an experimental one on which I'm playing around with dual booting Linux and Windows (another obsolete machine with an AMD 5x86 upgrade CPU instead of it's original 486-33, originally a piece of crap ComTrade). I also have enough spare parts that for about $150 (or $300 if you include the monitor) I could put together another 486-33, but why would anyone need six computers, four of them obsolete or pretty much so? I also have a shit-load of UPSes, one of them with enough capacity to run my main machine for nearly half an hour (a 900 Watt, 1500 Volt-Amp CyberPower unit).
All of them except the experimental machine are on my little 10 Mb thin-coax ethernet and run continuously. I've been debating now for about three months on whether I should buy a no-name 8-port 10/100 network switch. I figure if I'm going to spend $80 for a 10/100 hub I might as well spend $110 for a 10/100 switch.
Oh, and I still have the CPU and BIOS from my very first 4.77 MHz 8088 dual-floppy machine, bought back in 1985 or 1986, stuck in a drawer or a box somewhere. (I wish you could still get flip-top cases...) |
