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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (102072)	4/4/2000 6:30:00 PM
From: Paul Ma	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1577025

Ali I disagree with you that huge companies by default have the most stable machines. The so-called "stability" is not about sacrificing the speed (although there might be sub-optimal BIOS settings hidden from you for the reason), but mostly about having variety of parts to achieve the best margins under professional system stressing, plus capability to get software patch to work around some hidden driver problem which could surface only on particular and _new_ hardware configuration, untested before. There may be compatability issues from different hardware such as Geforce+Athlon,but to suggest that only big companies can fix this is wrong. A custom built computer by with a reasonable amount of computer knowledge can be just as stable as a big company computer. Putting the parts together, installing the drivers, then running intensive benchmarking programs to stress the system, would in my opinion be the steps needed to establish a system's stability. The big companies do not have a secret talisman to make their computers more stable, it's a myth. A computer with high quality parts and the proper configuration can be just as stable. Paul Ma P.S. I hope I didn't sound like a saleman because I have no pecuniary interest since I already stated that I would do it for free.

To: Ali Chen who wrote (102072)	4/4/2000 6:41:00 PM
From: that_crazy_doug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577025

<< lowest - Paul Ma (sorry Paul) medium - xxxgeeks.com highest - GTW >> Actually, the athlons i've built are much more reliable than the gateway ones. Gateway uses cheap power supplys, and they probably use cas3 ram instead of cas2. In general, they're not going to give you the quality components you'd buy if you knew what you were doing and got it all yourself.

To: Ali Chen who wrote (102072)	4/4/2000 10:07:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 1577025

Ali, You are assuming that all 3 start with the same parts. Actually, if you build the systm yourself, you can put in the best components, and still come ahead of Dell, GTW, HP etc on price, while these companies use garbage no-name parts, or integrated components. As far as the compatibility is concerned, none of the companies like GTW, CPQ develop drivers. They just pass them on to you. At some point, they stop, and say that system is no longer supported. But if you go with Brand name component, you are assured access to drivers as long as that component manufacturer is in business. The likelihood that a brand name component maker will remain in business is higher than a no-name. Another thing, with some of the DELL, CPQ, GTW etc, you get custom cases and custom motherboards. som parts can't be upgraded or replaced. Unless you are willing to pay 3 to 4 times the going price. That's for example what Compaq was asking for a CD-ROM drive (non-standard) for one of their systems that I have - something over $300, while at the time, you could buy a quality CD-ROM for some $75, (or junk component for $50). Joe