Those are good tips. The majority of our
stuff (especially once you remove records, which we mostly buy new) is used/pre-owned, so I'm well acquainted with that market, though not as much the surplus outlets. I did run across some off-lease HP workstations. I had my eye on an Inspiron 560 being sold at a "Jewelry & Repair" shop. And I am a haggler.
But over the weekend, I wound up purchasing a
Dell Inspiron 620 MT, with monitor, on sale. I won't bore you all (further) walking you through the entirety of my reasoning, but suffice it to say I decided that if I was going to get a PC, even temporarily, this would be the way to go. It was $609 before tax, which is still a budgetary hit, but seemed like a fairly good deal. Not spectacular by any means, but good enough. I see used ones selling for about the same price, so. I just went with the base system. I considered doing the RAM and Nvidia upgrades, but that would've put it up around $800, and I don't think I need those, so forget that. Plus, I can always upgrade it myself later, if need be. As it was, the only upgrade I went with was to the ST2320L monitor, which during the sale was just a $10 addition.
Another thing that influenced my decision is that this model is listed on Ubuntu's "certified hardware" page. The only difference is the model they list says "i-5-2300 @ 2.8 GHz" while the one I got is a 2320 at 3.0 GHz. But, I'm assuming (hoping) that the driver(s) apply to the series, not just that specific version. And I did find a handful of instances of people saying they had Ubuntu 12.04 on that specific chip. The only tricky thing, from what I read, might be some issues with the monitor and/or integrated GPU, like something to do with "nomodeset" or something. Hopefully that isn't an issue.
So, now the question is, presuming Ubuntu works, do I set it up to dual boot? To this point I had been working under the assumption I'd just do a clean install, but that was assuming I'd be getting a cheap used computer. Now I'm not so sure. On the one hand, I may as well dual boot considering I paid the "Windows Tax"—plus, I think I only get a recovery disc, not an actual install disc. On the other hand, reading over the Ubuntu documentation on dual booting and partitioning and all, it looks rather complicated, tricky, and risky, especially for a know-nothing novice such as myself. What do you fellers think?
If only the Hackintosh implementation were a little simpler and more straight-forward. I'd be all over that. Actually,
this method doesn't look
too terribly difficult, unless you run into one of the "if this goes wrong, then do this" issues. Hmm.
edit: monitor model correction
But a quick googling shows that my scanner is almost impossible for even the geeks to get working on Linux. Bah.
