Regressed93 wrote on 2022-03-02, 10:46:
Yep, and a far better price. Still no Platinum though.
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Would a SATA HDD and Optical Drive IDE be a better choice?
Personally I'd use a SATA SSD, but period-correct would be a SATA HDD. However SATA vs PATA is far less significant than actual speed of the drive itself.
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Would 80gb be enough?
Also when did 7,200rpm HDD's first come onto the market for consumers.
Much earlier. There was a great Australian site for this, but it seems offline now. Fortunately Archive.org has it backed up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140712040301/ht … ///////d/77.php
The Seagate Medalist Pro was the first consumer-level (IDE) 7200rpm drive in... 1998. They didn't become standard until a few years later, but by the time you were running >3GHz P4, 5400rpm was a decidedly low-end choice and it was mainly the size of the disk cache that differentiated the 7200rpm models. WD mostly used 8MB, but I remember the performance increase when I upgraded to a 16MB one.
As for size: that's entirely up to you. Any motherboard at this time would support pretty much any non-gpt drives (i.e. <2TB) out there. I thing 80GB would be about correct for the CPU/motherboard you are considering - but if you don't care about being period-correct, just go for an SSD. I use 32GB SSDs in my P3-era stuff and 80GB '00 systems.
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In the State of Queensland, dumping things on the the roadside is an illegal and fineable offense, but in other states, you can dump away with no consequenses, if you can haul it, you can have it.
The point isn't the specific location, it is that P4-C2D systems have almost no value at this point in time (too old to be useful as daily driver, too new to be collectable) so are being discarded in whatever way legal/feasible for nothing. There's no need to pay over the odds for this kind of system.
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I checked Craigslist, no one in Australia selling a Windows 98 Computer.
Given you hadn't specified AU and only said "$" I assumed US, where Craigslist is generally a good option. I'm not up to speed on what's best in AU in general and Queensland specifically, there will be something similar near you - but one thing is clear anywhere: just looking once at a site isn't how to find stuff, let alone good stuff cheap. You need to find a good site, and then watch it like a hawk. There are even really good deals on eBay Buy It Now. Why don't you usually see them? Because someone else did first and bought it first. What you are left with at any random moment are the bad deals. Don't buy them. Time invested to find the good ones pays off.
Also, you're not looking for a Windows 98 system, you're looking for a solid Windows XP system that you happen to want to install Windows 98 on. But mainly you're looking for "old crap pc found in grandpa's attic". Information contains value. If someone knows exactly what they have, they will ask more for it than if they don't. Best situation is someone who does take the trouble to let the PC boot and take a pic of the POST screen and says it doesn't boot further. That tells you most of the relevant specs and the only thing wrong with it is dead/missing HDD or messed-up boot sector.
Look in places like vcfed.org and amibay.com for much better prices.
I will, thanks
Still a good idea, but vcfed is mainly US and Amibay mainly AU. Still can give you better deals than some of the stuff you posted, but postage will hurt.
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Then you are more thrifty than I am.
No, if I was I would seriously offer it 😉
The point was you don't need to be particularly thrifty to do so much better with a system from this era. It's not like you're trying to put a Voodoo5 PCI on a Cx5x86-133 with AdLib Gold, Gravis Ultrasound Extreme and Roland SCC-1....
On a very unrelated note, at a Bar/Pub/Tavern here in Australia the average cost for one bottle of beer is $6AUD(Here in Australia, we call a bottle of beer a "Stubbie")
Owch. Was a lot less when I was there 25 years ago. Wouldn't have been able to get half as blotto in Cairns if it had 😜