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A friend of mine wants to sell me a computer for $50.00 and i am buying it for my 6yr niece.

he gave me two choices:
HP PENT. 3 933MHZ,256mb memory,onboard graphics,30gb hard drive

home made/no brand name, DURON 850MHZ,256MB memory, 16MB graphics card, 30gb

what's better? thank you

well on the HP is there windows pre-installed?

if so format that thing first chance you get and install full version on it

run over to local retailer and grab another 256mb of memory, you'll be fine

if not grab the duron with the dedicated video card, and again throw another 256mb memory in there


you would be amazed what a freshly formatted and non-manufactured windows xp install will do

I'd get the Duron. I always build with AMD. Is the 850Mhz the official clock speed? If so, I bet you could overclock it slightly to about 900Mhz.

Check if both motherboards have AGP slots available. Without an AGP slot, you won't be able to upgrade the HP graphics. These days, you need good graphics and memory for internet exploring, due to flash and streaming video.

Do they both have DDR memory, or is it SDR (PC100 or PC133)?

If you can gat a decent graphics card for Pentium based PC, go for it. (Onboard graphics is suitable for 2D only.)

It's really hard to tell on this one without seeing the guts of the Duron system. A homemade system is only as good as its builder. You could find a great ASUS board in there, or you could find a PCChips piece of crap. You could find that someone was picky about the optical drives, or that they bought whatever some computer-show vendor was hawking cheaply at the time. Same goes for all the other parts, and that's not including the care they took when building the system. Did they do a good job of cable routing? Choose a good case/power supply? A well-made homebuild Duron 850 would likely outrank the P3-933. A poorly one would fall below it.

Check if the HP will allow an AGP graphics card as an upgrade. If it will, it may be the better setup. If not, then it really depends on how the Duron system was put together.

P.S. While the Duron may be overclockable (probably easily so, if you know what you're doing) I recommend against overlcocking a system that goes to family and friends. Once it's out of your direct supervision, a system that's being pushed beyond specs can be asking for trouble.

great comments lonewolf

you really do have to watch for old motherboards, they tend to have leaky capaciters... especially in crappy brands

hoxlund wrote:great comments lonewolf

you really do have to watch for old motherboards, they tend to have leaky capaciters... especially in crappy brands

Yep on the caps; old Abit mainboards seem to have the highest rate for failing caps, though it's not exclusive to them.

I used to do what you do now...difference is, I did it ten years ago.

LoneWolf (mom-n-pop PC builder circa mid-late 90's)