subject: How To Buy A Cheap Computer [print this page] There are other limitationsThere are other limitations. Need a big hard drive to hold your digitized vinyl collection or loads of digital family videos? Forget it. Youll get only 40 to 80 gigabytes of storage. Theres also no separate graphics card with the muscle to let you blast space aliens at the highest resolutions. And although ads for these cheap systems often tout a "flat screen" monitor, thats just a sneaky way of making a cathode-ray-tube (picture-tube) monitor sound like a sleek LCD.
Given the constraints, we scaled back our expectations of what these machines could be expected to handle. Of the four we tested, three were $500 Windows-based machines. The fourth was from Apple Computer. Each comes with a drive that plays and burns CDs, and plays DVDs (but doesnt burn them).
Never one to compete in high techs bargain basement, Apple nonetheless recently introduced the $500 Mac mini, a petite machine that is roughly the size of a cigar box. The catch is that the mini comes without a monitor, keyboard, mouse or speakers. To outfit the Mac mini, figure youll spend another $170 for very basic peripherals -- equivalent to those that come with the Windows machines.
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There are other limitations. Need a big hard drive to hold your digitized vinyl collection or loads of digital family videos? Forget it. Youll get only 40 to 80 gigabytes of storage. Theres also no separate graphics card with the muscle to let you blast space aliens at the highest resolutions. And although ads for these cheap systems often tout a "flat screen" monitor, thats just a sneaky way of making a cathode-ray-tube (picture-tube) monitor sound like a sleek LCD.
Given the constraints, we scaled back our expectations of what these machines could be expected to handle. Of the four we tested, three were $500 Windows-based machines. The fourth was from Apple Computer. Each comes with a drive that plays and burns CDs, and plays DVDs (but doesnt burn them).
Never one to compete in high techs bargain basement, Apple nonetheless recently introduced the $500 Mac mini, a petite machine that is roughly the size of a cigar box. The catch is that the mini comes without a monitor, keyboard, mouse or speakers. To outfit the Mac mini, figure youll spend another $170 for very basic peripherals -- equivalent to those that come with the Windows machines.
