[js1138]

My standards for price would shock Mac users. Right now my motherboard is a hand-me-down 5-year-old dual PIII-500 abandoned by a CAD jockey. Disk is a 40 gig aquired for $10 at a garage sale. Monitor is a 17 inch Dell, $20, garage sale. Counting the DVD player, SCSI CD burner, 512 megs memory (hand-me-down), Windows 2000 (garage sale) I have about $150 invested.

I collect parts at garage sales until I have enough to build or upgrade.

[Michael Barnes]

I'm pretty cheap when it comes to comp HW as well...(FWIW, I have owned a Mac, Power Mac 7100/80). I didn't like being locked into only buying certain HW from certain vendors. I love the flexability I have in PC's. And like you say, it's amazing what you can find at flea markets and garage sales; buyer beware of course..

Once my first kid came along, I ditched the "latest and greatest" HW REAL quick. Now it's all about squeezing every last ounce of everybit of hardware I have.

[js1138]

LOL. I inherit my kid's discarded computer stuff. My son is into CAD professionally, so what I get is still good enough to surf. And I do freelance IT, so I get lots of discards.

By the way if you're looking for speed, you can get IBM 9 gig 10,000 rpm SCSI ultra 160 drives for $29. They're discontinued, but widely available. I'm building a RAID 5 server for a client with them.