Igor,
"... Is it time to build him his own? ..."
Pardon me, _his_ own?? Please escape the 19th century, should be his/her own. When you're
talking about children, it's just as likely to be either. 2 years ago I built a system for a neighbour's
family, they have a son aged about 10, daughter about 8, both are equally frequent users of the
system, everything from iTunes to various games, printing pictures to an attached HP inkjet, school
work, etc.
Your comments about the used market are very welcome though, and that's what I did where
appropriate to save costs, ended up with something pretty decent: ASUS M2N-VM DVI, 6000+ 3GHz,
4GB DDR2/800, ASUS 8800GT 512MB (silent Glaciator cooler), Centurion Plus 534 case, LSI U320 SCSI
PCI (cost 5), 146GB 15K silent SCSI (cost 25, way quicker access time than SATA, so a much more
responsive system), etc. The only new items were the PSU (700W CiT Black, works great!), wifi card
(cost 7) and a 500GB SATA for general data (actually the case was new, but was half-price). Amazing
what one can do with a bit of careful hunting. 3DMark6:
http://3dmark.com/3dm06/13891731
If I was building something today, I'd bag an i3 500, P55 board, 4GB DDR3/1600, used TRUE, GTX 460,
Antec 300, etc. Cost very low, performance through the roof. I'm building something like this right now
for someone who works in my local post office (i3 540 @ 4.4GHz, Gigabyte P55-UD4 and GTX 460, etc.)
though I persuaded him to get a new SSD as a boot drive (120GB OCZ Agility3). No need to spend the
earth to make a really quick machine.
daglesj, good comment on backups. I included a 2nd 14GB 10K SCSI for regular disk cloning (OS was
XP Pro, so very easy to do with XXClone).
NOTE: one thing I've noticed about how children use PCs. iTunes downloads can be enormous,
which clogs up the C drive. Best to ensure user accounts are located elsewhere, or at least
that their iTunes main folder is somewhere else.
Ian.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram