Dermot, To answer your questions.
Imagine you had a nice Jag with all the trimmings. That's a normal new PC. Now take out 4th and 5th gear. That's a Celeron. Maybe not the best analogy but it's Sunday morning. It's been awhile since I looked at the specs but the Celeron suffers from limited internal cache, bus speed and math performance. Anyone that runs computationally intensive programs such as any graphics program will find their performance suffering. Budget wise, an AMD processor for the same money will run circles around a Celeron.
Building your own PC is simple. Its primarily a mechanical process. You need to learn how to mount the motherboard in the case, mount the drives, learn where the cables plug in, turn it on and install the software. A quick google search gave me this site
http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/ that goes through all the steps of building your own PC. Each component has its own warrenty. If you buy it from your Mom and Pop, they will take care of it. If you build it yourself, its usually easy to figure out which component is bad. I haven't looked but I'm sure that there are many sites out there that have repair instructions.
I am writing on a PC that I built 3 weeks ago. Let me run down the specs and the costs.
Case. Reused case from another PC.
400W Power Supply $20.00 on eBay.
Motherboard. NF7-S Abit Socket A 400Mhx Bus from Motherboards.Com. Dolby Audio/network on motherboard $128.
CPU AMD XP2600 333Mhx FSB from Motherboards.Com $114.00
Memory 512MB PC2700 DDR from Motherboards.Com $91.00
Memory 512MB PC2700 from another PC $0.00
Hard Drive. 120G Maxtor. $89.00 after rebate.
Mouse/Keyboard. Reused from another PC
Floppy Drive. Resued from another PC
CD-RW. 52x24x52 Reused from another PC
DVD Drive 16x40x. Reused from another PC
Video Card nVidea. Reused from another PC.
Operating System. Reused from another PC.
Monitor. Reused 20" monitor
Net Cost for a fast PC. $442.00
Total cost if I paid for everything including a 17" monitor: about $950. I went to Dell's site and priced a similiar configuration for a Dimension 2400 for $1079. $125 more and Dell wouldn't let me configure it the way I wanted. They wouldn't let me put a CD-RW in one bay and a DVD drive in another. They also had no options to upgrade the video card.
I also priced the same configuration with a Dimension 4600 that let me upgrade the video card to an nVidia but still had the problem with the CD/DVD drives. Total cost $1212.00 or $275 more.
I also took a look at their cheapest PC at $499 and determined that I could build it for $469. So not much savings there.
To Tedcanvas. The Grumble is about all phases of running a framing business. It is framers talking to framers about every area of their business and that includes computers. The tech forum is seperated from the other forums. If you don't want to read about computers, then don't read the tech forum. The other forums have a wealth of information on framing itself. And don't read the Business forum if you don't want to know about business issues. And don't read the warped forum if you don't have a sense of humor. Seriously, read the main forum (and all the forums). We are all framers and we can converse, confident in knowing we all have shared interests in framing. Comeradery, et all. All for one.....
[ 09-07-2003, 11:35 AM: Message edited by: Larry Peterson ]