anybody tell me what's so special about this system?
The word "workstation" might mean something.
It could mean it comes in an expensive heavy duty case, or
not.
It could mean it has a beefy/expensive power supply, even
redundant power supplies, or not.
It could mean ECC memory, faster PCI bus, SCSI HDDs,
server-grade motherboard, etc, OR NOT.
We don't have the details on this box so it's kinda hard to
say. It was probably worth a little more than a "PC" in
it's day, but now it's aged and by modern standards,
relatively slow. Then again, it is only $200. You might be
hard pressed to put together as reliable a box for
fileserving at the $200 price-point, except again, it's aged
now and while it could run for another 10 years, it might
not. There must've been "some" reason it was retired though
only the former owner may know why.
I can get one for $200 with a flat screen Monitor and a Brand New
Wireless Keyboard, and Optical Mouse,Fresh clean install of Windows
2000 Professiona.
Just "install" of Win2k, or the license, certificate too?
Not a bad deal if the installed software is licensed, but
again, it's slow by modern standards for many uses.
My neighbor is telling me to scarf it up......It
does not have an AGP slot, and no sound card. Is that a good deal
still?
What do you want to do with it? If it's going to be a
server, there is no reason to want put an AGP card in it,
unless it had a PCI card of course, then you'd want least
traffic on PCI bus, except this box (by the specs you
provided) doesn't have Gigabit ethernet so PCI bandwidth
isn't really an issue, unless it has a PCI SCSI card and is
doing some massive databasing or other use where it'll be
shifting a lot of data internally instead of over the lan.
HP TC2100 Workstation/Server
Intel Pentium-III 1.1GHZ
256MB RAM
40GB Hard Drive
CD-ROM Drive
3.5" Floppy Disk Drive
Two: DB9 RS232 Serial Ports!
Parallel Printer Port
10/100 Network Port
Two: USB Ports
We dont' know what you need so it's hard to put a value on
it. I took a glance at HP's specs page on it and it seems
more like a PC-turned-server, pretty-low end so far as
servers go so I'm inclined to suggest that if you have $200
to put down on something like this that you're better off
allocating another $100 or so and keeping an eye out for
some deeply-discounted new Dell servers, which periodically
have discounts and rebates to end up under $300. Those
typically don't have AGP slots either though, so bottom line
is that if you are looking to build a PC for typical PC
uses, best value is using PC parts, not a low-end server.
