Denys writes:

> Now, about cheap PCs and consumer PCs.  I think my friend Wirt is way too
> modest.  He places a value of $0 on each of his work hours.  I daresay his
> time
> is far more precious and would be willing to peg it easily at $100 to $200
> hour, if not more.  So messing with a $500 eMachine and bringing it up to
> speed, a task that probably consumed 4-10 hours, makes the inexpensive
> eMachine very expensive indeed.

Unfortunately, what Denys writes isn't quite true. So far I haven't been able
to find anyone to pay me $200/hour for my work. I do tend to charge my
high-dollar $500/hour rate when I'm doing things I don't much care to be
doing, such as washing dishes or mowing the lawn, but otherwise, when you own
your own company, the actual pay rate for everything else you do seems to
unfortunately hover around Denys' $0/hour first estimate.

Let me clear up one other confusion in Denys' post. It only took me 10-20
minutes to add a NIC card to the eMachine. That's all I did (other than
delete some of the home shopping software that came up with the machine). It
was the HP Pavilions that required 10 full hours of my time -- and for which
I would be pleased to charge someone $5000, given how grumpy I was when I
first started playing with them.

Other than that, the eMachine came up as quickly and easily as any PC I've
ever bought. It did take another two hours to either download or install all
of the software that I wanted to have on the machine, but that would be true
of any PC that you would buy, regardless of whether it was classified as
home, professional, or even workstation.

The primary reason that I'm interested in these cheap machines (besides the
fact that I'm a "fiscal conservative") is that, in the end, cheap always wins
-- and these are precisely the kinds of machines that are likely to populate
real-world offices (who also tend to have "fiscal conservatives" for bosses
:-).

Wirt