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Strategies & Market Trends : Systems, Strategies and Resources for Trading Futures -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Esteban who wrote (44298)	3/29/2001 1:06:52 PM
From: Patrick Slevin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 44573

I used to tinker, back when I first bought a machine (1978) the Apple ][ + had to be tinkered with. If you wanted to do anything aside from playing games, anyway. As the machines became more compartmentalized and the software more complex I drifted away. My young son during those years always tried to help and so now he is the guy around here that builds and repairs these things. I do not have the inclination. Further, I find that for about the same amount of money I can purchase them built. The AMD machines cost a thousand each. They came with a 50x IDE as well as a CD/RW, W2K, a PS/2 keyboard, 2 button mouse, floppy drive, faxmodem, sound, 256K SDRAM, 100MB Zip, 27 GB 7200 RPM HD, and the chips are Athlon Thunderbird 900 MHz. I could have gone faster, but the price increases became exponential above 950 MHz. So I got the above, built, for a thousand each plus shipping. I'm not certain I could have done much better had I bought the parts and had my son build them but I could be wrong. I had planned on going to a local shop, but for convenience I used this site. pricewatch.com Of course, some of the items I did not need but had to take anyway. I guess I could have done better in that regard. But a lot of the shops have a base machine that you customize, hence the twin CD drives for example. Also the faxmodems are of no value to me. They shall be removed for other machines if the need arises. Other items that I could have purchased locally, like the keyboard which sells for $15 bucks here, was only $5 with the machines so the nickels and dimes add up roughly even. What I did was to go to that site, select Athlon 900, and then go to the least cost guys. I had a problem with one of them, LSS Technologies, and so skipped to Explorer Micro out in Ohio. Took about a week. The hardest part was deciding what should I put with what, and my son pointed out "why this and why not that" so it was relatively quick. The Dell is a fine machine, but the reliability for the price isn't satisfactory. At least not for my applications. I may still allow it to run "some" trading programs, but they shall be backed up on the other machines. The Dell has certain minor design problems in the case as well, mostly nuisance stuff. It may be the only machine that I've ever seen with an eject button on the case instead of allowing the drive to protrude. So the eject button is a plastic piece on a pivot; it often comes loose and you have to disembowel the machine to repair it. Sort of like dropping the engine to do a minor tranny repair on a Saab or removing an engine out of a Pontiac to replace a spark plug. I did it in a rush one day and cut my hand. Damn machine has streaks of blood all over the case. I really should have done his long ago. I knew to, I just never did. Hank Camp, the programtrading.com fellow, told me years ago that all he does is leave spare parts all around the room. Whenever anything gives him a problem he yanks it out and puts another device in it's place. Fixes them on the weekends. Makes a hell of a lot of sense.