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Reality check: Why would anyone spend good money on decent components, then cripple them by putting bottom-feeder memory on it? Stability will go down the toilet. Performance won't be as good as it could be--memory performance is overrated, yes, but so is CPU performance and the same people who cry about how miniscule the gains from using quality memory are often the same ones who waste a weekend by trying to milk an extra 25 MHz out of their CPUs. Getting memory that runs at CAS2 instead of CAS3 makes about as much difference as that extra 25 MHz does, and it won't burn out your system prematurely either.

Let's consider all of this, and use numbers to back them up. I just priced a Gigabyte 7ZX-1 motherboard with a 700 MHz Duron CPU. This is the slowest, cheapest Duron that's still available everywhere. Price, including fan: 165 bucks. The motherboard is respected as a stable board, priced nicely, and includes Creative audio onboard. A decent Enlight midtower case that won't slice you up and a 300W power supply is $62. A 32-meg Guillemot GeForce256 card--not state of the art, but for mid-range gaming and anything I do, it's drastic overkill--is $80. So you've got a foundation for a system that was absolutely unbelievable just 18 months ago, for 300 bucks.

Considering what you get for $300, I think you can afford to put something other than $25 128-meg DIMMs in them. Save those for some other sucker.

The same vendor had 256-meg CAS2 PC133 Corsair DIMMs for $129. Corsair's not my first choice and Crucial is offering free shipping right now. A Crucial 256-meg CAS2 PC133 DIMM is $96. The highly regarded Mushkin high-performance DIMMs (latency of 2 all around, so they're great if your motherboard allows you to adjust all your memory timings but admittedly they'd be overkill on some of the boards I have) are $150.

So we're at $396 for an awfully nice PC that just lacks storage. CD, DVD, and floppy drives are pretty much commodity items these days. Buy Plextor, or buy whatever's available at a decent price and doesn't look like it cost $12 out of the back of a van parked at an abandoned gas station. That leaves hard drives.

Now that memory costs next to nothing, a lot of people think real computers have to have 768 megs of RAM. Really, you get diminishing returns above 128 megs. Two years ago I was ridiculed for suggesting people should get 128 megs of RAM. Now people are routinely buying six times that amount. Trends. (sigh.) Since a 256-meg stick costs around 100 bucks, fine, get 256 so you can run any OS you want and run it fast. But really we need to be thinking about hard drive speed. Sure, a hard drive doesn't do anything for Quake frame rates, but for everything else it does, and if you're like me and actually use your computer, you'll appreciate a fast disk really quickly.

The IBM 75GXP is currently the fastest IDE drive on the market. At $135 for a 30-gig model, it makes absolutely no sense to buy anything else, period. If you need more storage than that, a 45-gig costs about $150, a 60-gig $215, and a 75-gig $275. The sweet spot seems to be 45 gigs.

But if you're going to run Linux or NT or Windows 2000 and you were ready to buy 768 megs of RAM anyway, why not look at SCSI? An Adaptec controller will run you $200, while a Tekram will start at around $100. You can get a nice 10,000 RPM drive from IBM, Quantum or Seagate for around $235. Now we're talking a 9-gig drive here, but speed's more stem out with a $33 LG Electronics CD-ROM and a $14 Panasonic floppy drive. The damage? $844. That's without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor, but seeing as everyone likes different things there, I always leave those out of base pricing. And of course you still have to buy an OS.

That's an awful lot of computer for about $850. The components are high enough quality that they should be good for 4-5 years, and I suspect the system won't be a slouch by then either. The specs will be laughable, but if someone sits down to use it, they'll have difficulty believing it's "only" a 700 MHz computer. And if you want to upgrade it down the line, it'll continue to be worthy of your trouble for a long time to come.

I think I found my new hangout. Well, in about five weeks it'll be my new hangout. I was going to give up using Windows for Lent--not that I enjoy using Windows, but not using it would be a terrible inconvenience, and the purpose of Lent is to give up something that reminds you of what Jesus gave up. Since Windows is an everyday part of life, it would suffice--I could use a Mac at work, and just run Linux on my PCs at home. But since my job is partly fixing PCs that run Windows, or writing about Windows, I can't very well do that. So instead I gave up meat. All meat. If it used to be an animal, it's meat--no using seafood as a loophole.

So, Penny's BBQ, a little place I stumbled upon yesterday, won't be my hangout until Lent's over. I love BBQ--must be because I'm from Kansas City. My favorite R.E.M. song is "The One I Love," which Michael Stipe wrote after his favorite BBQ joint burned down. Listen to the words really carefully sometime. He's not talking about his prom date.

I always get sidetracked when I'm talking about BBQ. Penny's is about 10 minutes from home, depending on how obnoxious St. Louis traffic feels like being. It smelled good outside the place, which is always a good sign. It's tough to find BBQ in St. Louis, let alone good BBQ. But Penny's turns out to be comparable to the typical fare you find at every other stoplight in Kansas City, I'll be a very happy camper. But that's easier said than done. I've never really understood it, because there's plenty of good BBQ in Chicago and in Kansas City and, frankly, throughout Missouri. If you're ever driving through Missouri on I-70--my condolences if you are--in a tiny little town about an hour east of Kansas City named Concordia, there's a BBQ joint called Biffle's that's nearly as good as the best places in KC, and it's easier to get to and not as crowded. I plan my trips to KC so that I end up driving through Concordia around meal time.

The downside to giving up meat is I can't really write about it, beyond that. Had I given up Windows, chances are a lot of people would have wanted to read about how it was going and what I was finding. Oh well.

Heh heh heh. Need a cheap computer for someone? How's a Tekram Socket 370 microATX board with built-in audio and video sound? Promising? You bet, especially considering its $35 price tag here. Put it in an inexpensive microATX case, drop in a $50 Celeron-533 PPGA (this board only works with Celerons with the old Mendocino core, not a Coppermine) and a $50 Crucial 128-meg DIMM, add your favorite hard drive, and you can have a really nice system for $350 or so. Or if you've got parts laying around, you know the drill.

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