Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Little computer build...

I've never done a build, but I am tempted to with this one.

I need a computer to host two disc printers. Small and cheap is the goal.

It needn't have all that fast a processor. Four gigs of RAM would do nicely with Win 7. Four USB ports is enough and I don't need an optical drive at all.

The one thing I might "splurge" on would be a small SSD as a system drive. Not infrequently, I need to just quickly print a few discs and it can be a pain to wait four-five minutes for a system to boot up. It's true enough, though that a clean Win 7 install on a new computer would probably boot up a lot quicker than the bloated computer I'm currently using.

I feel like I'm missing something here, though, regarding building: If I buy a kit such as this one from Newegg, for $200, I still have to buy a hard drive, copy of Win 7 and, if I'm correctly understanding what's included, a USB card. All of that adds another $150 ~ $200.

How is that better than something like this which goes on sale Sunday for $300 and is well-reviewed, presumedly has compatible components and doesn't require any time on my part to build?

and let me ask a followup already.

If I were to buy an off-the-shelf HP, Gateway, Dell or what have you and wanted to replace the HD with an SSD right off the bat....

A- If the system came with a recovery disc, could I simply remove the existing HD, swap in the SSD and put in the recovery disc to re-build the system?

2- If a system did NOT come with a recovery disc (as most don't these days), how do I go about swapping the main drive? Burn my own recovery disc? Or are there better ways to clone the system drive onto a new SSD? Do SSD drive manufacturers include a utility of some sort to do this, or do they assume I have some idea of what I'm doing?

Yeah, paying Microsoft is what kills you.

Any way to run the disk printers from Ubuntu?

If you must have a fresh, legal copy of Windows, you should probably look at a cheap/refurb Dell or HP. I think it's damn near impossible to build it yourself for less.

You're already killing me with stuff I need to Google.

My understanding is that the printers can work from XP through Win7 only.

They are currently running on m old Photoshop computer, which is just loaded with stuff and running Vista 32bit. I'm having some problems running multiple jobs on the printers simultaneously and their tech support said it was likely low system resources. I want to do a fresh install on this computer, but have to be realistic that it's going to take time for me to meticulously migrate everything over to the new Photoshop computer.

Plus, this is a full-size case and I wouldn't mind something smaller. So it had me wondering if I shouldn't get a new, small, "utility" computer just to host the printers.

I built mine about 2 years ago, but I went with slightly better than average parts. The build still cost me about 2 grand.