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General discussion

best computer for college student with little $

Aug 4, 2004 4:57AM PDT

I dont have too much money, but need to find a good PC for college. Just wondering what everyone thinks is good.

Discussion is locked

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Re: best computer for college student with little $
Aug 4, 2004 5:22AM PDT

If I was very budget limited, I would look at the 500 buck unit at office depot (nice with LCD!)

Next down the list are refurbs at compgeeks.com I have some weather station data collection and video surveilance P3 1GHz that was all of 170 bucks with Windows 2000. All I needed was a monitor and some old keyboard.

Bob

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Re: best computer for college student with little $
Aug 5, 2004 3:06AM PDT

I just finished my PC...I bought a Dell Refurb for $349 and then added a few components to make it a whole lot faster...

P4 2.66
DVD/CD-RW
Nvidia GEForce 5200 256MB PCI
768 MB Ram
40 Gigabyte 7200 HD
12 Gigabyte 5400 HD (For my music)
Win XP Home

It runs very nice and it was only $500 total...Of course if you need a monitor it will be a little more.
I was going to build my own from scratch, but after a little cost/value investigation, I decided to get the dell, because the components alone would have run me near that price, plus it had Win XP.

Are you willing to dig into your computer a little, because non-oem parts will in most cases perform better and will be cheaper too.

You really should get a better PC than you think you need, because running even basic applications slowly is a pain in the ***, and worth the money to avoid.

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Re: best computer for college student with little $
Aug 5, 2004 12:30PM PDT

Check out ebay auctions. Be sure if you look there to add in the cost of shipping before you make a bid and ALWAYS check the person's/business' feedback. There are overstock dutch auctions for refurbished pc's frequently.