g556871349ea@deneb.ucdavis.edu (0040;0000025649;0;745;352;) (11/09/89)
I would certainly want to include the Radius 16 and maybe even the 68881. Of course this may depend on what kind of work you plan to do. Then again, I've found the speed to be invaluable in just about everything I use. Also, I would certainly recommend to most people a 40 Mb hard disk or larger. Each software upgrade gets so much larger.
steveg@com.com (stephen harold goldstein) (11/10/89)
Organization: science applications international corporation, cseic
Adam.Frix@f200.n226.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Adam Frix) (11/11/89)
Jim Gaynor, who seems to reside in employment at my lovely alma mater The Football State University of Ohio, writes: >Time for a new thread... <grin> >. >Here's the situation (and it is _purely_ hypothetical): >. >You have $4500. >You have access to University Student/Staff Discounts from Apple. >You want a Macintosh. >. >You need _at least_ a Mac Plus, 20 meg HD, and ImageWriter II. But >you obviously have more money than that at your disposal. Given these >parameters ($4500, Univ. Discount Prices) and needs (Mac, HD, >printer), what would be *your* ideal solution - the system you'd want >to purchase? >. >Answers should include some software, and third party hardware is fair >game as well (quote your best price and source). There is no correct >answer to this one, it's all a matter of opinion. I just want to find >out what, in the various net.opinions, the best total set-up for this >price would be... OK, as I happen to have an OSU computer store price list here in front of me, I'll offer my choice of a good $4500 system. Your mileage may vary, depending on whether you're interested in good hardware or a good software investment. . Let's start with an SE/30, no hard drive, at $2799. Add a hard drive (my choice for the toaster boxes is an external one), say a 40 meg Jasmine (no flames, PLEASE) or a GCC, at maybe $800 tops. We're up to $3600. You may be asking, why an SE/30? Top technology at the lowest cost, that's why. The IIcx is $200 more, and that doesn't include a monitor of any kind. . OK, let's stick some RAM in that puppy. Bad news: with this machine, ya gotta stick four SIMMs in at a time. Comes with four 256K SIMMs, so you can add another four 256K pieces in the other RAM bank and have a total of 2 megs RAM. That'll do you, for now. I don't know of anyplace selling 256K SIMMs, but I do know that private users are selling their old ones for around $20 apiece. (Make sure you get the 120ns SIMMs from someone's SE, not the 150ns ones from an old Plus.) With shipping, call it $90 for that extra meg. Now we're at $3690. The ideal, of course, is to buy four 1 meg SIMMs; but, the lowest price is still $80 each, and $320 would take a bite out of the budget. Oh, yeah, don't forget installing those SIMMs. Unless you're willing to wait for the ever so generous Apple 90 day warranty to expire (hmmm, one _can_ hold one's breath in this case), you'll want authorized Apple installation of this memory. Call it $40, for a total of $3730 so far. . I'll go out on a net-limb here and suggest that you buy an Apple external 800K floppy drive. First, it's always nice to have a second floppy drive. Second, we've been having some troubles at work lately with swapping floppies between older 800K drive machines and newer FDHD machines. I think the FDHD screws up a disk that was made on an 800K drive, and makes it so the 800K drive can't read that disk once it has been played with by the FDHD. (And, once we've tried to read it on the Pluses, the FDHD won't recognize it, either.) So, to maintain compatibility with other users and with old disks you've made on older machines, I suggest this solution. I got a used Apple-brand 800K external for $175, from Maya Computer in Vermont (see the magazines for their ads--they used to have a place here in Columbus, but that's on hold temporarily). You can also try the off-brands for about the same price mail-order. As far as I know, and for purposes of this discussion, the 800K externals work with the '030 machines. Total now is up to $4005. . Hmmmmmm. Now I'm in a quandary. Only $500 left, and we've yet to buy a keyboard, printer or software. Let's back up a bit, and see where we can save some money. The obvious place is to downgrade the computer a bit. (One shouldn't downgrade storage capacity; a good HD is a great thing to have.) Let's back up and buy an SE instead. (whisper, whisper: if one is careful, one _might_ find a dual 800K drive SE at your campus computer store at blowout prices, around $1375.) Again, I suggest no internal hard drive in a toaster box. So go for the dual drive SE FDHD, brand new out of the box, OSU price is $1675. That's $1100 less than the SE/30. Now we're back down to $2905. Of course, the previous RAM buy won't work the same way, so let's scratch that and we're back down $130 to $2775. Let's stick some RAM into the SE, now. Must buy either two or four 1 meg SIMMs. Say, two megs (for a total of 2.5 megs installed) at $80 each from the Chip Merchant, plus the $40 installation again, for a total expenditure of $200, brings us up to $2975. Whoa, we're cookin' with gas now. Notice I kept the 800K external drive purchase; the same reasons apply, even with the SE, simply because of those infernal FDHDs. (It's guaranteed the 800K external drives work on a plain SE.) . You need a keyboard, of course, with the SE. I dunno, I kinda like the DataDesk keyboard over the Apple offerings. $139 at MacWarehouse or -Connection. We're at $3114. . Now, let's buy us a printer. DeskWriter, DeskWriter, DeskWriter. HP has come out with a winner here. $740 at OSU. Get a couple extra cartridges (why not), and it's up to $780. Total so far is $3894. I also like the GCC Personal Laser Printer, but it's roughly twice as much as the HPDW. That would end your budget, and not leave enough for any software. . Now, you've got $606 left over for software. That's a chunk o' change, especially at the campus store. Get SUM II for your hard disk, that's important. And SUM is a good set of utilities. OSU sells both Word and FullWrite, at rougly the same price ($80-$90). I like Word. I also like MacWrite II, and it's only $45, but I think Word at twice the price is about five times as powerful (maybe more). I also like having Works around, for doing those things that I only do once in a blue moon. And, Works does _great_ continuous feed one-up labels. That drawing tool in Works can save you a bunch of hassle. For graphics, I'd say SuperPaint or Canvas. But of course the campus store sells the Claris stuff, so you can get MacPaint for $35 (2.0) and MacDraw II 1.1 for $105. For the price, you can't beat it. Oh, and get Redux 1.5 for backing up that hard drive. Wonderful program, great support, and the author, Dave Winzler, is a great guy besides. For telcom purposes, go for White Knight 11.0 from The FreeSoft Company. I'm not sure what its street price will be (it just came out a couple of weeks ago as the upgrade to Red Ryder 10.3), but the retail price is $139, so bet on a MacWarehouse or -Connection price of $80 or so. Others I know like MicroPhone. Version 1.5 is still around at $115, and MPII version 3.0 just came out, at $219 (I think). But given those prices, White Knight is a _great_ deal. And since you'll have a DeskWriter, I'd suggest having Adobe Type Manager around. You just don't know how good things can look until you've seen ATM output on a DeskWriter. Despite the grumbling I hear on the net, I still say it's a good $60 purchase (-Warehouse or -Connection). The ATM and MacDraw II combination is a great budget substitute for those of us who can't afford PostScript. . The price differential between the SE/30 and the plain SE leaves you a bunch of room to maneuver around in. It depends on your requirements or your inclinations on whether you'd rather buy more hardware or more software. It looks, though, like you can stuff that SE with a full four megs of RAM and still come in under budget with good software to boot. Also consider AppleCare at $100/year for that SE dual. I mean, what's peace of mind? Especially consider AppleCare given the recent Quantum hard drive hassles Apple has put its customers through. . If you like the idea of saving even more, the Plus is $700 less than the SE dual. Yeah, it's a tad slower than the SE. Yeah, it's got no expansion port. (No problem, though, if you're not going to add any cards in.) Yeah, it's got no upgrade path other than selling it outright. Yeah, it's got a power supply that you have to baby and will pay $250 for a new one anyway within two years. Yeah, it doesn't use ADB to hook up keyboards, pointing devices, and whatever else the world can think of hooking up. But hey--it runs the same programs the SE runs. For that matter, it runs the same programs the SE/30 runs. I just wanted to remind you that the Plus is still an option, for the budget-conscious buyer. . Keep in mind also, the SE can't run color monitors like the SE/30 can. The SE/30 has built-in support in the ROMs that the plain SE doesn't. In essence, the SE/30 is the toaster-box equivalent of the II*x series. . You're right that there's no correct answer. But I think the essentials here are a good hard drive, some good RAM, and the DeskWriter. . Hey, this _was_ fun. . --Adam-- -- Adam Frix via cmhGate - Net 226 fido<=>uucp gateway Col, OH UUCP: ...!osu-cis!n8emr!cmhgate!200!Adam.Frix INET: Adam.Frix@f200.n226.z1.FIDONET.ORG