I realized recently that I bought my computer (a Dell 4700) about five years ago. On eBay. For $300. It’s a single-core Pentium mumblemumblegHz (not real fast). True, I have since given it a decent power supply, 4 gigs of ram, larger hard drives, and a nice but cheap Nvidia graphics card, but still.
Does anyone have a suggestion of a low-end dual or quad-core PC that takes SATA drives and a standard power supply? I’d be putting Linux on it, so I don’t care what the OS is,and I have monitors and keyboards. At or under $300 would be great, so discontinued N.I.B. on eBay would be fine, if you see something there.
Your best bet is to just get a new “barebones” setup. New motherboard, processor, and possibly ram if you don’t use DDR2 already.
I buy most of my components from Newegg.
If you’re hesitant about installing a motherboard (really the only thing you’d need to worry about), then you can get a mb installed in a case etc sans a lot of the stuff you already have:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010030003&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&Order=REVIEWS
Also consider picking up a laptop or netbook. You can get a netbook for $300 easy.
There’s actually a good deal on at the moment at Best Buy (I know that sounds crazy) but they have a laptop for $320 that actually looks pretty good – might be worth checking out…