Would you buy a vomit box if it came with decent hardware for a reasonable price?

[sedrosken]

I think it'd be interesting to see what people think on this. Personally, I'd have to see just what hardware it's got. I dunno about an FM2 or Axx, I've never seen one in action, but if it was like a Pentium G or even a Celeron G or Core 2 Quad I'd jump on it for a decent price. Just about anything released within the past five years or so would be a major upgrade from my Inspiron 530. I got that hunk-a metal for $300 refurbished in Oct. '08. I've dropped ~$75 on a decent GFX board and ~$30 on an additional 2 GB RAM. It came with 2 GB RAM, a Pentium Dual-Core E2200 (upgradable to a Core 2 Duo only, no quads here b/c I have the G33M01 mobo, this is also the reason I can't have more than 4 GB memory in it), and onboard graphics. Oh, and a WD2500 SATA HDD that I still use. I want to get me one of those 128 GB SSDs, but being 15 and poor, I'd be hard put till probably Christmas, which isn't really that far away. It works, but I lust for moar powah.

Off topic: Does anyone know how to get the clock in Lubuntu to show standard time? Translating from military time is fast getting old.

 

[Chewy509]

Off topic: Does anyone know how to get the clock in Lubuntu to show standard time? Translating from military time is fast getting old.

Re: the clock: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Documentation/CustomizingTheClock

 

[Stereodude]

If it has decent hardware is it still a vomit box?

 

[Chewy509]

In order to answer your question, I have to question the mere definition of a vomit box... My personal understanding of a vomit box, was one of low quality and underperforming for the price paid... A decent spec'ed box from a major OEM, at a low price could not be considered a vomit box IMHO?

Would I purchase a name-brand OEM box that was well spec'd for a decent price, yes, I have in the past. (HP xw4600 workstation at nearly 25% of the original price, as it was being replaced with the Z600 series and the local distributor was getting rid of stock). If I came across the same sort of deal, I would go it again. (At the time, I couldn't build my own box from parts cheaper than that box came, and it had a 3yr onsite warranty included).

BUT, I would only do it for new hardware, not second hand hardware that has been refurbished. (I know a few people who have worked in that part of the industry, and they admit themselves it's a lottery if you buy one of their refurbished machines). The big concerns on refurbished hardware is:
1. How was the equipment treated to begin with? (You'll be surprised).
2. Can I visually inspect in the internals? (looking for bad caps, something that Dell, HP and Lenovo have been plagued with in different models).
3. Warranty... what exactly is covered.
4. OS licenses. (You'll be surprised here).
5. How easy is replacement parts... especially on Power Supplies or other custom stuff in the case. (Dell - I'm looking at you here - yes I remember the day you used standard ATX PSUs, but would swap a few pins to make your systems incompatible with regular ATX PSUs).
6. How well was the refurbished box tested? (Some refurbishers consider it tested if it powers up to the BIOS, not caring about if it actually makes it into the OS).

 

[Mercutio]

If you're tempted by a consumer desktop and have a good working knowledge of hardware, all I can say is prepare to be disappointed.
I've opened up HP desktop machines that had no (ZERO) expansion slots on a MicroATX board. In 2012. It's not at all uncommon to find desktop machines that only support two SATA drives.
It's pretty common to ship boxes with the crappiest power supplies that can be found. Nothing like opening up somebody's mini-tower and finding a 135W PSU!

If someone pointed a gun to my head and said I HAD to buy a consumer desktop, I would say that the gunman had some very odd priorities, but I think I'd probably look at an HP's product line since HP uses identifiable Asus branded motherboards. Asus isn't my brand of choice either but at least it's an additional point of consistency.

My current office desktop machines are under-$300 mITX 4GB, 120GB SSD, Pentium 2120s. A lot of computer for the money. That vomit box would need a DickPort before I'd give it any kind of serious consideration.

 

[Tannin]

Hmmm ... basically, if it's any good and the bits are worth having, it's not a vomit box. You may consider this a canonical answer insofar as I invented the term vomit box, quite possibly on or about your birthday.

However, not all vomit boxen are real ones! There are also fake vomit boxen! These are quite reasonable machines where, for reasons unknown to mortal man, the powers that be at Dell or HP or Acer or wherever have made a very serious error and assembled a computer using decent quality parts. These rare and wonderous machines can be well worth having, provided only (a) that you have a thick skin and can cope with the embarrassment of having a Dell or Compaq or similarly-badged other monument to corporate greed and consumer stupidity in your room, and (b) that you can overcome the sense of shame you may feel when you remember that, in consequence of speccing up this outlandishly decent machine on Dell's bill of materials, some poor young IT engineer with a still-wet-ink phD is now looking forward to a long and successful career in the burger-flipping trade.

 

[P5-133XL]

I've bought several Dell machines just because they were much cheaper than I could build them myself. My two 3.2GHz P4 Dimension 8400's come from exactly that: The entire machine was priced lower than I could buy just the CPU and I was able to sell off the monitors, on Ebay, and got another 30% off. Those machines are still in use today with the add of a relatively modern GPU they fold just fine.

If you know what you are getting and the value of the component parts then I don't see a problem. The difficulty with most manufacturers of low-end vomit boxes is that you do not know what they contain. Those manufacturers have a large incentive to put in cheap unreliable components to lower their costs to maintain competitiveness. However, that matters not if you know what you are getting and it is a good enough price for most of the time bad small components are still commodity items that are replaceable.

P.S. Not Dell, in that they use proprietary cases, motherboards, and power supplies to stymie potential upgraders. So even if you get a fantastic deal, you are generally still stuck.

 

[Bozo]

I put together an Intel NUC (boxdc32171ye) with a Kingston 60GB SSD and 2GB ram for ~ $370.00. High class vomit???

 

[Mercutio]

NUCs are fantastic little boxes. They make dual NIC models that can work as micro-servers as well as NIC/WLAN versions. Since you pretty much have to pair them with Intel or Crucial mSATA drives and they have Intel-branded guts anyway, the only potential source for vomit would be the RAM, and chances are you'll wind up with Crucial or Kingston DIMMs anyway.

I've been incredibly tempted to replace my HTPC with one, just because they're fanless, but I'm not convinced Intel onboard video is up to snuff for all my decoding needs.

 

[ddrueding]

I've been incredibly tempted to replace my HTPC with one, just because they're fanless, but I'm not convinced Intel onboard video is up to snuff for all my decoding needs.

I maxed out a BOXDC53427HYE and had it playing back a 4k sample on repeat for 2 days as a test?

 

[Mercutio]

I guess I should re-phrase. The larger issue is that I've read that Intel's HDMI audio support is lacking in some respects and can have A/V sync issues above and beyond what can come from normal video decoding.

 

[ddrueding]

Ah, that sounds like it is beyond my ability to test. If it isn't, let me know what to do.

 

[Bozo]

NUCs are fantastic little boxes. They make dual NIC models that can work as micro-servers as well as NIC/WLAN versions. Since you pretty much have to pair them with Intel or Crucial mSATA drives and they have Intel-branded guts anyway, the only potential source for vomit would be the RAM, and chances are you'll wind up with Crucial or Kingston DIMMs anyway.

I've been incredibly tempted to replace my HTPC with one, just because they're fanless, but I'm not convinced Intel onboard video is up to snuff for all my decoding needs.

Do you have a part number for the dual nic NUC. ?

 

[LunarMist]

No. I would not buy anything associated with vomit. uke-r:

 

[Mercutio]

Do you have a part number for the dual nic NUC. ?

I was slightly mistaken. There are dual HDMI models (meh), but there are two Mini-PCIe slots on all NUCs so NICs can actually be added if you need 'em.

 

[Santilli]

The first and last Dell I bought had a motherboard that would support only one ide drive per channel, when the standard was two per channel. Took 6 months to finally figure it out, and only because of repeated calls to Dell, and finally finding a guy that knew what he was doing.

Likewise Apple, using substandard parts, 140 power supply, in a 3000 dollar box.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, my main beef with Apple is that they take cheap foxconn hardware and stuff it into a shiny case and sell it for $1300 at least, when it costs them $400 at most to make it. I understand the main point of a business is to make as much of a profit as possible, but jeez. Embezzlement much?

 

[Handruin]

Yeah, my main beef with Apple is that they take cheap foxconn hardware and stuff it into a shiny case and sell it for $1300 at least, when it costs them $400 at most to make it. I understand the main point of a business is to make as much of a profit as possible, but jeez. Embezzlement much?

People buy their stuff and are happy. They are appealing to some who don't know and don't care and that works for them. You and I may know and see better but that doesnt change things. Apple of today seems all about single-use products for their laptop line because it seems impossible to upgrade any component. Their new workstation also seems challenging with that odd case design.

None the less I can't see upgrades being targeted for vomit boxes anyway. They're so cheap to begin with.

 

[Tannin]

Yeah, my main beef with Apple is that they take cheap foxconn hardware and stuff it into a shiny case and sell it for $1300 at least, when it costs them $400 at most to make it. I understand the main point of a business is to make as much of a profit as possible, but jeez. Embezzlement much?

Just think of it as stupid tax. No-one with any clue has to pay it. Sadly, the money goes to Apple shareholders where if it was a real tax it would go to running hospitals and building schools and financing tax breaks for ultra-wealthy big shareholders in companies like Apple .....

...um ... as you were. Carry on.

But seeing as someone raised the subject, we might mention that Apple is so good at avoiding its legitimate tax obligations that it has huge sums of ill-gotten, untaxed money stashed away in tax havens like Ireland. Unbelievably, it is now borrowing very large sums against the secret tax-dodge treasure-pile so that it can pay a dividend using the borrowed money and avoid moving the dodgy funds back into a first-world country. Yep, that's right: they have borrowed lots of money at commercial interest rates despite having plenty of cash money on hand simply because that's the only way they can avoid helping to pay for the services that made it possible for them to make all that money in the first place - services like crime prevention, roads, education for their workers, courts to enforce their nasty, mostly phoney, intellectual property lawsuits, hospitals to keep their staff alive, and so on.

 

[ddrueding]

Yup. Tax against corporations is a bad idea to start with.

1) We can't put a gun to the head of every other country to make them play along.
2) Taxing something we want more of is not a very good idea.

Note I'm not saying there should be less taxes, just tax things we don't want (unhealthy, bad for the economy, whatever) instead of things we do want (income).

More: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012...lan-that-economists-love-and-politicians-hate


Wow, that was a derailment (sorry).....if anyone wants to continue this we should start it anew elsewhere...

 

[Tannin]

Tax things that are unhealthy and bad for the economy? You mean like Apple computers?

 

[sedrosken]

If you were to take a look at this in 2008, would you label it a vomit box?

Refurbished Dell Inpiron 530
G33M01 mobo (only supports up to Core 2uo, dunno what specific model, and 4 GB is max RAM capacity... The G33M02 based ones can use up to a Core 2 Quad Extreme I believe, with 8 GB RAM on a 1066 MHz DDR2 bus) It is micro-ATX, BUT I'm sure that the pins for the power supply are switched or something... Can't complain too much, seeing as I've had no problems with it since I got it(seriously Dell, dick move)
Pentium Dual-Core E2200 @ 2.20 GHz
2 GB DDR2 800 MHz RAM
16x SATA DVD-RW drive
250 GB WD2500 Caviar 7200 RPM SATA HDD
Integrated Intel G31 Express graphics chipset, VGA output
Realtek HD Audio
1 x PCI Express x16
1 x PCI Express x1
2 x PCI
8 x USB 2.0 ports, 4 in front 4 in back

Bear in mind that this is late 2008 we're talking about, and this is being sold for $300, without monitor. Would you buy it?

 

[CougTek]

Refurbished Dell Inpiron 530
[...]

Bear in mind that this is late 2008 we're talking about, and this is being sold for $300, without monitor. Would you buy it?

No. It's worth around 100$ IMO. I've owned a computer store for years and that's I would ask for it if I was to sell such a system now. Are you buying or selling?

 

[sedrosken]

No, I'm just talking hypothetically. If you were looking at this system in late 2008, would you consider it?

 

[Mercutio]

That was about $300 worth of parts in 2008. The E2200 was a half-step above a Celeron. The motherboard might've sold for as little as $45 and the hard drive might've been $50 even back then. It wasn't a fantastic buy.

 

[sedrosken]

Still, coming from a prebuilt manufacturer like Dell I was surprised they didn't pull another Dimension 2300 and give me 512 MB RAM to get the price that low. The 2300 had a fairly beefy Pentium 4 but only 128 MB RAM, and this in ~2002ish when 512 MB was mostly universal. It sold for $300 and coasted on the Pentium 4 name and being so cheaply priced to sell. Needless to say, people who didn't know better were suckered in, found their computer very slow a few short months later, and, most not knowing how to upgrade RAM, condemned an otherwise perfectly okay system to the trash. IIRC they also didn't come with an AGP slot (though there was an artifact for one... They obviously thought about it but decided against it considering the target market generally didn't know how to upgrade squat). A vomit box if there ever was one, but considering it had fairly standard parts and form factors, it probably wasn't as bad as some you guys might've seen.

 

[CougTek]

In late 2008, you were 10. No one expects a 10-years-old to make enlightened choices. There were better deals back then, but there were worse.

 

[Mercutio]

IIRC they also didn't come with an AGP slot (though there was an artifact for one... They obviously thought about it but decided against it considering the target market generally didn't know how to upgrade squat). A vomit box if there ever was one, but considering it had fairly standard parts and form factors, it probably wasn't as bad as some you guys might've seen.

I have no idea why they strip expansion slots off boards that should have them. I'm actually glad that nobody is still trying to make PCI video cards because I can't tell you how often I've seen someone who thought they were making their $250 crapmachine better with a $250-from-Best-Buy PCI GTX430.

 

[sedrosken]

Because they save about 3¢ worth of plastic that way.

Funny enough, my Dad bought that for me (I guess he got tired of me hijacking his computer to screw around with).

Money was tight (still is, hence the reason I'm still using it) and we had to consider what we could afford. That was honestly the best deal for the money that we could find. Though he could've stepped the processor down to a Pentium 4 3.8 HT and 1 GB of RAM, and dropped the bundled OS to Vista Home Basic, saved about $100, and I wouldn't have noticed a difference at the time.