Then I remember what's wrong. Ever read a review of a piece of hardware and get the feeling the person was going to recommend it no matter what, because he's riding a gravy train of free hardware? I have. Way too often. Just yesterday.
Fair warning: The rest of this post does contain web bugs. They're one-time web bugs from a source I trust (the source I bought this server from, in fact), but if you're morally opposed to web bugs, don't click the "more" link. It's been a while since I ran across anyone who was, but you never know.
So today, when I noticed a couple of DVD+RW drives under $200 on Compgeeks.com's
These are DVD+RW drives. There's a war between the dash-r and plus-r standards. Both create discs that are readable in your regular DVD-ROM drive. Dash-r disks are a little less expensive. Plus-r disks are compatible with a slightly wider variety of DVD drives, and the rewritable disks are more convenient, but they cost more.
Your best bet really is to buy a dual-standard drive, one that does both. Then you can take advantage of compatibility when you need compatibility, and you can take advantage of cheap dash-r disks under those conditions when those work fine.
But the plus-r drives cost a lot less, because they're suddenly the second-most desirable type of drive on the market, not the most desirable drive on the market like they were last summer.
If you're willing to live with that, you can get a new NEC for $199 or a refurb HP for $170.
If you're looking for a cheap computer to run Linux on, you can find several on the
I don't unconditionally recommend everything
But I've bought keyboards, mice, hard drives, CD-ROM and CD-RW drives, SCSI cards, motherboards, and systems from them over the past five years, and their service has always been great.