[LUAU] Who's building system units?

[kahrytan]

Clifton Royston wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 08:26:24AM -1000, Karen Lofstrom wrote:
>   
>> My old Zen teacher's computer is a battered hand-me-down
>> (approximately seven years old) on its last legs. The CD drive has
>> failed and the HD is making unpleasant noises. He may need a new
>> computer soon. I could assemble one from parts, but it might be too
>> expensive to buy all the parts retail and have them shipped here. If
>> you're going all new (rather than just upgrading a few failing parts)
>> I gather that it's *usually* cheaper to buy from someone who gets the
>> parts wholesale. So, who here in Honolulu is building PCs now? Who's
>> reliable?
>>     
Aloha,

  You could shop at Newegg.com. However, complain about their high 
shipping cost first.

I recently purchased Motherboard, cpu, single ram stick, and hdd for $25 
s hipping. But I complained earlier about cost of shipping. They offered 
at $10 discount rebate after a completed order. Since cases are the most 
expensive to ship, checkout 
http://www.personaltouchcomputers.com/Cases.htm (ignore components, 
prices to high). For a Power Supply, try a eBay powerseller thats 
willing to ship USPS Flat Rate.

>   The low-end Dell prices are hard to beat, but you made a good
> argument against them.
>
>   Don't know of any place in Honolulu you can get a low-cost PC, all
> assembled.  Maybe Personal Touch or PDC Systems (Personally Designed
> Computer), but I haven't priced them out.
>
>   If I buy one single part, it can be cheaper (or at least no *more*
> expensive) to buy it locally and pay the "paradise" markup, e.g. at
> Pure Digital (Byteware's successor.) If buying more than one thing,
> it's almost always cheapest to buy them online, all from one place, so
> you're paying only a single shipping charge.
>
>   Usually I just order everything from Newegg, occasionally from
> ZipZoomFly where you can sometimes get better deals on shipping to
> Hawaii.
>
>   Right now I think the best values for a cheap from-parts system are
> via buying a microATX AMD 740-series motherboard, which has integrated
> ATI graphics - that's one less part to buy and one less part to fail. 
> The AMD x64 CPUs are really cheap and fast.  I recently bought a mobo +
> CPU + RAM for about $110 + shipping; add P/S, HD, DVD-ROM and maybe
> you're at about $250 without case?
>
>   -- Clifton
>
>