Chosing cheap desktop: recommendation?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: S P Arif Sahari Wibowo <arifsaha-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| I would like to find a cheap desktop for playing with Fedora 9 and Centos 5.

Really cheap: buy off lease.  See my message to the list of about 24 hours 
ago.  Not perfect!

Alternative: follow freecycle or craigslist for a cheap or free
discard.  Problem: you probably should consider 1G a minimum although
512M will certainly work.  The only cheap RAM these days is DDR2 so
that eliminates many older boxes.  This approach is perhaps too
demanding of time.

|  - Serenity T1150, AMD Sempron LE-1150 2GHz, nVidia nForce 630a / GeForce 7050
| chipset.
|  - Serenity T1100, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, apparently some Via chipset (S3
| UniChrome Graphics).
|  - Shuttle K45PC, Intel Celeron Dual-Core E1200, Intel 945GC / ICH7 chipset.
|  - Serenity T1080, Intel Celeron Dual-Core E1200. Intel 945GC / ICH7 Chipset.
| 
| (from
| http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=cpl&id=170.45&sort=3)
| 
| Any suggestion?

I would avoid anything named UniChrome.  Historically there were no
decent open source drivers.  I don't know if that has changed.

The K45PC is nice and small but has no optical drive and no apparent
way to add one internally.

The T1150 and T1080 seem fine, for all I know.

The Semperon LE-1150 appears to be single core.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Sempron_microprocessors

The Celeron E1200 appears to be dual core.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microprocessors

So the processors seem close enough to not matter much.  Dual core is
a bonus.

The T1080 has a larger disk.

So: the T1080 is better but the T1080 is less expensive.  Your call.
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