Mom's Barebone Computer

Hola

i am building a comp for my mother, such a sweet lady lol She is going to use the computer for home office, word, excel and such. She plays no games, basically the only other thing she does is she ocassionaly scans pictures to print on her printer.

Anyhow she wants me to build her the cheapest computer i can that will work for her. She doesn't care about looks or anything as long as it does everything she wants. She upgrading from a amd case6 with 3d now technology (300mhz) so almost anything goes. hahaha

So basically what i need is a great cheap setup for her that works and is somewhat reliable. I was browsing around newegg.com but there is so many parts that i am lost.

Give me your barebone system specs =]

oh and she already has a monitor, keyboard, mouse and a 20gb western digital hard drive to use if i want

Thanks =]

 

You can use the case, fan, and the ports such as the usb, and power supply from your her old setup also

Other than that you basically only need a mobo and processor, am I missing anything?

 

if your upgrading the processor and mobo i would look at a low priced video card to replace the old one, and maybe USB 2.0 to make scanning and printing faster.

 

Yes but he said that he didn't need a great video card since his mother isn't a big gamer. And it might now be worth the money to upgrade the usb since they want low budget. And if his mom was using a 300 mhz then I'm sure speed isn't the worst of the problems since shes probably used to waiting.

 

the old case is pretty much shot, power supply is also gone

basically right now i am looking at getting
case + power supply
motherboard
-looking at getting mb with lan and audio integrated but will need those also if not
processor
video card
ram
cd-cdr rom drive

your right speed isn't going to be much to her but i was hoping to get her something around a 2 ghz or similar

right now she wants to spend like 300 to 400

 

if that is your price range go here www.magicmicro.com

they have prebuilt bare bone systems for like $200

 

Alright sounds good.

I did some preliminary searching on newegg. Here is a basic setup of something that could work. Let me know if you would change anything or not and if ya think this setup might just work, thanks


CODEGEN Beige Mid-Tower Case with 400W P4 Ready Power Supply, Model "L-6018-1-S2F" -RETAIL
Item# N82E16811182538
$25.00

ECS "K7VTA3 V5.0" KT333 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A CPU -RETAIL
Item# N82E16813135149
$41.00

AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 266 FSB, 256K Cache Processor - Retail
Item# N82E16819103383
$57.00

PMI-Power Memory Int. 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-2700 - OEM
Item# N82E16820209004
$75.00

Rosewill ATI RADEON 9200SE Video Card, 64MB DDR, 64-Bit, DVI/TV-Out, 8X AGP, Model "92SE-AD-064B" -RETAIL
Item# N82E16814164001
$41.50

Product total: $239.50

 

I would lower the Ram since shes not going to be doing any games or high end software besides the picture stuff and word processing. 512 DDR ram seems a bit over the end, i think she would be fine with 128mb at the most. Same thing with the video card, I would lower that to 32mb since shes not going to be doing any hardcore gaming anytime soon.

 

I don't think that the RAM is costing enough to sacrafice it. If anything it will be nice for her since the digital pictures program suck up RAM like none other.

 

the digital camera won't suck up the ram. the pictures will just take up space. ram stands for random access memory, and its basically used when your running multiple programs or high system resources like games. It just makes the programs run more fluently.

 

The camera won't but most programs that people use for editing them eat up RAM. As goes with most digital art and editing programs, cept maybe paint.

 

Oh well the RAM was the most expensive thing on the list at $75. I think if he brought it down to 128mb it would bring the price down to like $175 total.

 

No, I see what your saying. However, I do think he could save money in another way. I think it is the Geforce 2 or 3 Titanium cards that you can buy on ebay cheap. One of my friends has one and his comp can play stuff like COH, so it isn't lacking in power, but it would save money.

 

It is Geforce 3. Try and get the Titanium (Ti) version of the card. you can get it for under 30 bucks and it is very fast. It can hold its own against the Geforce 4 Ti cards.

 

Good lord, don't get that ECS motherboard. I hear of nothing but problems with them.

She does not need a Geforce 3 card. Integrated video will do just fine.

There is probably little price difference between 128Mb of RAM and 512Mb of RAM. And as Snuffles said, picture editing (not to mention picture transferring) programs can eat up a lot of memory.

Here is a good setup for her. All prices are from Newegg.

Antec Case/300W PSU: $49
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=11-129-117&depa=0

1.7Ghz Intel Celeron (Socket 478): $59
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-112-169&depa=0

Gigabyte motherboard w/ Intel i845GV chipset: $53
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-128-238&depa=0

512 Mb of PC3200 Corsair Value Select RAM (incase you decide on upgrading to an 800Mhz FSB P4 processor later): $83
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-145-479&depa=0

OEM Copy of Windows XP Home: $87 (or use whatever OS you can)
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=37-102-141&depa=0

52x CD-RW drive: $27
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=27-182-011&depa=0

Total: $358

Much better (more stable too) system than any with an ECS or PCChips motherboard. If you are looking for a pre-built system though, I would only recommend Dell. You can hardly build a low-end computer for as cheap as they give them away. Good luck.