Those Magnificent Men and Their Computing Machines
Well, I took a video course at Phila Community College. At that time the Imaging lab had P-3 800Mhz (around there don't remember exactly). Rendering 30 seconds of video with those babys usually involved at least a full crash to the desktop, if not a BSOD. If you took a $90.00 computer course, I think they were giving away P-2s. Didn't go for that. So later on I bought an Emachine with a Prescott P-4 3.06Ghz. You can imagine how surprised I was, when I found out that I didn't have to go to lunch while waiting for Photoshop to apply a single filter. Wow, the computer age had finally arrived. As I posted earlier, my E2200 machine, is at least twice as fast as that, even if it's having a bad day.
An Ahtlon "Lima" LE-1620 is actually too low end to be stocked by Newegg,. They start at the LE-1640, and it's $39.95.
With 2 gigs of DDR800 running around $25.00, DVD drives on sale at $22.00 and the Pentium E5200 priced @ $72.00, it shouldn't take more than a rudimentary grasp of mathematics to figure out you could build a machine based on that CPU for about $300.00 anyway! $50.00 for a Seagate 250GB SATA 2 drive, and about $60.00 to $70.00 for a P-31 Gigabyte mobo, and you're done, well with the exception of some crappy $30.00 free shipping case with a POS PSU, that you'd have to get rid of ASAP.
So, if you had $150.00 left over after buying the E5200 box, exactly how f****** much do you think would be wrong with it that you couldn't fix it with that money?
The most comforting thing about the decision making process, is that it spares those of us incapable of making a good one, the agonizing realization that we've made a bad one.
I castigate myself for my own periennial bad decision with this mantra; "never give advice, wise men don't need it, and fools won't heed it"!
And if you're wondering, yeah, I enjoy being a buzz-kill.