Samsung SyncMaster 226BW

I bought it online, had it delivered by UPS next business day (50 NIS). Knock on my door at 08:40 - no phone calls or anything. Setup was very easy, probably thanks to the nvidia settings app that comes with their drivers. It's beautiful and bright. I did not calibrate it yet and did not even check what model panel is inside. 1720 NIS (~$436) vs. $310 at NewEgg before the $40 mail-in rebate.

Too New Hardware

Ah, hardware so new Knoppix doesn't support it. Glorious!

BIOS that came on the motherboard if the first release version, 0201. Doesn't recognize the E6550 so complains about being unable to load microcode. Also BIOS updates are very important. So that should be addressed first.

The BIOS image is 2MB so doesn't fit 1.44 floppy (connecting the floppy drive was a bitch!). Have to flash it using either a USB mass storage device (which I don't have handy) and the BIOS built-in flasher or through Windows-based flasher (but no Windows live-cd here either) or by burning an ISO CD image with FreeDOS, the ASUS DOS flasher and the unzipped BIOS image itself to a CDRW and booting off that.

But can't burn a CD if booted from the burner, so attach the trusty old Toshiba SD-M1402 to the sole IDE port, enable JMicron IDE controller in BIOS (on by default), boot into Knoppix from the PATA drive. Find out SATA drive is not recognized by Knoppix 5.1.1 (Linux 2.6.19) when set to IDE mode in BIOS. Only when set to AHCI in BIOS will it get recognized. Ubuntu 7.04 install disk (Linux 2.6.20) does recognize the drive in IDE mode, so that is fixed already. Create proper CD image using fdos builder template and gleaning the right mkisofs command line parameters from the WinNT batch files, burn image in K3B. Again, the ASUS SATA DVD drive won't boot off the CD, so boot off the PATA drive, type afuflash /i0503.rom in DOS, wait a while thinking "I knew I should've bought a UPS!" and voilà, new BIOS.

Still can't overclock without lm-sensors working, and for that need new kernel.

Still don't know how to flash the optical drive without running RedmondOS.

New Computer

So. Now I have an almost functional computer once again. It lacks a hard drive, but while I'm waiting for someone to sell me one of these, I'm running the Ubuntu 7.04 install CD (the ASUS DRW-1814BLT won't run Knoppix 5.1.1). I'm buying a USB storage device tomorrow when a shop opens (about time). I have not yet overclocked the thing or even ran 3D graphics. I don't know whether the built-in sound device is bearable. The version of lm-sensors and the kernel that come with Ubuntu 7.04 don't support my motherboard. But the computer is damn quiet, so I'm pleased. I need to flash the BIOS and the firmware on the burner, and find out how to underclock the video card in Linux (I think nVidia's closed-source driver does that).

The usual price comparison over US prices, all except one are from newegg.com and are for today, without rebates and without shipping and handling.

	Make & Model	US price	Israel price (NIS)	US price in NIS	ripoff pct
CPU	Intel Core2Duo E6550	184	995	772.8	28.75
MB	ASUS P5K-E WiFi-AP	210	970	882	9.98
RAM	Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4D	179	1242	751.8	65.2
Video	ASUS EN8600GT Silent	137	900	575.4	56.41
Case	Antec P150	160	910	672	35.42
HDD	Samsung HD321KJ	80	490	336	45.83
Monitor	Samsung 226BW	350	2081	1470	41.56
Optical	ASUS DRW-1814BLT	34	249	142.8	74.37
Total		1334	7837	5602.8	39.88
exchange rate		4.2

Notice the 65% "tax" on performance RAM.

Except for the hard drive, for which the price comes from www.goldtop.co.il with no guarantee on my part for anything, all other parts are available at www.gibornet.co.il and except for the monitor were successfully purchased for those prices by me personally. I have personally witnessed the monitor being available and am thinking of buying it (once I'm sure I don't want to go for the LG L226WTQ which over here is $50 USD cheaper than the Samsung).

The optical drive can be bought for 200NIS, and it's so cheap anyway that I don't count it.

Long Time No Update

I did not forget R.J., but I keep forgetting to visit.

My WD400, bought in May 2001, finally died. Didn't lose much data as it has been dying for a while now and I had backups. Removed it and the Maxtor from March 2000 (that died a couple of months ago) and bought a Seagate 320GB 7200.10. It's quieter, but I think it runs warmer. I don't see a performance difference, though I know there must be, despite the same interface and rotation speed, what with the platers being at least ten times denser now. Cost me 120 USD, 50% more than the listed price on newegg.com. KSP, where I bought the Barracuda and the Caviar, have very no-nonsense but efficient service. I think I was in and out in under 60 seconds, and it's a five minute walk from Azrieli Towers.

Weather is weird: very hot and raining a bit.

Again sitting in one room with M. Is loud, looking for ways to cope.

Boss says I might be able to get an early discharge. Will see.

Hardware - Stalling

I have been planning to replace my aging computer for a while. First I have been waiting for my conscription to end and my contract to kick-in, so I'll have income. I had the money to buy a computer even before, but I didn't want to spend it. Then I was waiting for a better alternative than the DFI nForce 4 Ultra which was expensive, ran hot and required lots of fiddling. I have been waiting for an ATI-chipset-based overclocking-friendly full-featured not-overpriced socket-939 motherboard. Then AM2 came out, and with it better motherboards. Still nothing that awesome, and Anand said "wait for Conroe". Conroe came out in the summer, and yeah, it's awesome and I want it. But there are no decent cheap motherboards. The cheapest, most problematic board with Conroe/Allendale support, the Gigabyte DS3, costs a thousand NIS. And of course, this is as frustrating as ever:

	Item	US price	US price in NIS	Price in Israel	Ripoff rate PCT
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6600	333	1458	2000	37.17
Mobo	ASUS 975X P5W DH Deluxe	240	1050	1700	61.90
Ram	Corsair DDR2 PC-6400 2x1024MB Kit	274	1200	1850	54.16
Video	Brand GeForce 7300GT 256MB Silent	83	363	500	37.74
Storage	Western Digital Caviar 2500KS 250GB	78	341	430	26.09
Exch Rate: 4.377			4412	6480	46.87

To this I need to add a decently-quiet, well-ventilated case and a quiet, efficient, stable power supply unit. That can be a thousand NIS together. And I need a monitor.

The more I read about this stuff, the less I'm sure there's a good choice. Every part has problems, compatibility issues, etc. Wanting it to be stable, cool, quiet, and performant while not costing like a car appears to be too much.

Burner

My hard drive has finally filled up and I was unwilling to delete the House episodes I've pirated as I believe I'll want to watch them again, so I've bought a DVD burner. A dirt-cheap Sony DW-Q30A (actually a LiteON SHW-1635S) was what the local store had on hand, and the review said it's ok. A switch to 80 ribbon cable, firmware flash and setting the burn speed to x4 managed to get it to consistently write successfully on cheap x8 media, as long as I don't do anything IO intensive while it chugs away. My hard drives are struggling with the demand for consistent high speed reads, especially as the files got heavily fragmented on an almost-full disk. I have to say two seasons on four disks is a welcome change from burning a whole cake, both time and space-wise. I'm a bit worried about the media's longevity so I'll probably go and pick up some good archival quality media, but what I have should be enough to relieve storage pressure.

With the free space, I'm pirating 24.

Update

• The weather is hellish.
• Strangely, I'm excited about my current assignment. I wonder how long that will last.
• Was ordered to give a presentation on a system I've participated in building to rest of dpt. Was horrible, because I didn't return to the big picture after each chapter so people who lost me midway had no way to reorient themselves.
• Appears to have found a bug in IBM C/C++ compiler for zOS, systems people promised to check whether it's documented.
• Female team member appears to be afraid of me. I didn't do anything, it's just that none of us are all ok in the head.
• New team member is the most painfully extroverted person I've met, with no tact whatsoever, zero experience in behaving at a workplace, programming, working in teams, quasi-military reality, etc.
• Immediate boss is control freak, not talented at management at all.
• Services we must rely on provided by other departments don't work so it looks like our stuff doesn't work and we look like idiots to our clients.
• Buddy got left in the sun for more than ten hours because security officer freaked and decided that state of alert equals war and he can disregard the regs. His CO couldn't do anything about it.
• Got detention for a week for being late. Spending it in an air conditioned room with a fridge, microware oven, cold/hot water thingy, phone with civilian line and an unmonitored broadband internet connection reminded me once again that I'm not really in the army. Was kind of a vacation!
• I work in the public sector, so it all sucks, and I can't quit because I'm under contract. Because I can't quit, they can treat me like shit, and sometimes they do. Of course they know they get shitty work from an unsatisfied, undermotivated, undertrained, unwilling, often even downright depressed and rebellious workforce, but because it's the public sector (no competition, budget is decided with no correlation to actual work being done, promotions are decided with no correlation to accomplishments) nobody cares. Does that sound cynical enough? I'm a real patriot of my country, BTW, and I believe in doing what I can to improve what I can, but really, the system fights you every step of the way.
• Boss' boss said a number of PHB lines so bad I had to force myself not to literally ROFL on the spot. Unrelated buzzword spewage is not funny when you have to actually work with the man.
• AM2 and Conroe both look good. Of course Conroe is designed in Israel, so I'd buy that, but if AM2 still beats Intel at price/performance with moderate overclocking, I'll probably vote for the underdog.
• FFDB goes nowhere, but I haven't given up yet, it's just that carving time is hard when you're depressed and no one shows interest anyway.
• The latest fandom wank sounds all exciting, but I haven't read it yet. [Ed - I've meant the mssrcibe story by bad_penny]

Take care.

Hardware Shopping - Dual Core!

Dual core is all the rage now, and with AMD's entry-level dual core processor killing the competition, one can buy one heck of a machine for quite a reasonable price, when you think about it.

part	make & model	US price	US price in ILS	IL price in ILS	markup
cpu	AMD Athlon 64 X2 (939) 3800+ 2x512KB	365	1678.21	2250	34.07%
mobo	MSI nForce4 Ultra (939) K8N Neo4 Platinum	125	574.73	840	46.16%
ram	OCZ/Corsair/Kingston 2x512MB PC3200 CL2.5	90	413.81	780	88.49%
video	XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB	150	689.68	1050	52.25%
hdd	Western Digital SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar SE	85	390.82	470	20.26%
total		815	3747.24	5390	43.84%
exchange rate	USD to ILS	1	4.59784

Prices in US are rounded up and include shipping & handling, and don't use rebates (20$ and 25$ mail-in rebates are available). Prices in Israel include 17% VAT.

I chose AMD over Intel because of price/performance, but if Intel's hardware virtualization technology lives up to its hype (together with the rest of the cool new stuff that comes in the designed-in-Israel due-in 2006 next-gen Intel chips), I might reconsider.

Personally, I'd want to get a motherboard with integrated graphics (a GeForce 6150 + nForce 430 based solution sounds promising) because those 1000NIS on a a video card I'm not going to use are bugging me.

Compared to last time I did this, I've upgraded to CL2.5 RAM and swapped a WD for the Seagate hard drive because of availability issues.

We are still being ripped off on RAM.

Hardware Shopping - NF4 and low exch. rate!

Continuing the recurring theme of shopping for PC hardware (with other people's money, of course), we take the availability of nVidia's newest chipset (actually, it's a single-chip solution for mainboard logic, but anyway) and the drop in USD to ISL exchange rate into account to produce the following budget-oriented (but fully-featured!) setup:

Hardware	Recommended Component	US Price	ISL exchange rate	US price in ISL	IL price inc. 17% VAT	ripoff rate
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 512K 1.8GHz 90nm for 939	$142	4.33	615	860	39.8%
Motherboard	MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (s939, nForce4 Ultra)	$140		606	860	41.9%
Memory	Brand 512MB PC-3200 CL3 x2	$100		433	640	47.8%
Video Card	Pine XFX 6600GT PCIe 128MB GDDR3	$172		745	1060	42.8%
Hard Drive	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB SATA w/ NCQ	$100		433	600	38.5%
sum:		$654		2,832	4,020	41.9%

Again, it's not a full computer, it's not necessarily the best offer in any way, the prices are from an unspecified vendor (including shipping but not assembling) and I take no responsibility for anything you do with this information I do not even guarantee is true.

1. The entry-level CPU was chosen because the 5%-10% advantage offered by the next step up isn't worth the money.
2. A non-SLI motherboard was chosen because buying a second video card is not a real option (notice it's the priciest item!).
3. CAS-3 memory was chosen because of the price premium for CAS-2.5 (not to mention CAS-2!), and hearsay stating it often works in CAS-2.5 timings just as well.
4. The 6600GT is the current sweet-spot (overly drawn discussion of reasons why isn't worth typing up). Because the motherboard is of the newer PCI-Express varienty (instead of the dying-out AGP), we take the PCIe version.
5. The 7200.7 NCQ has the best performance and warranty conditions (3 years full + 2 years limited warranty). The newer 7200.8 behemoth is slower, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 and 10 have a really crappy warranty by the Israeli importer and the Western Digital is outperformed (hasn't happened in years!). Just take care to get an NCQ part - the same model exists without NCQ, which is a vital feature for heavy multitasking performance, as recently shown by Anand Lal Shimpi.

Of the 42% difference between US and IL prices, 17% goes to the government. The other 25% is for shipping and someone's kids' college.

Commerce - ripoff

If I were in the market for PC hardware today (I'm not 'coz I'm poor), this is what I would be shopping for (listed is barebones system only, this is not a full computer!).

The system is "most bang for the buck" oriented, for general work (actually it's supposed to be the best for anything but multimedia encoding (not creation, mind!)) and mild gaming (actually, I'd leave my fanless Radeon 9000 as I'm not running any games at all), the processor would get overclocked as far as it would go while being rock solid during Israeli summer using standard heatsink and fan combo (or a cheap & quiet alternative), and of course you need two identical DIMMs (pieces of RAM) - I just couldn't decide which.

I only used reputable vendors I know, prices include shipping & handling. Exchange rate is for December 17th. Spreadsheet work done using OpenOffice's Calc.

category	part description	USD	rate	US price in NIS	price in Israel incl. VAT	ripoff rate
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (939, 512K)	159	4.34	690.06	1040	150.71%
Motherboard	MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (nForce3 Ultra, 939)	139		603.26	1175	194.78%
RAM	Corsair PC-3200 512MB XMS (DDR400, CL2)	105		455.7	865	189.82%
	Corsair PC-3200 512MB Value (DDR400, CL2.5)	75		325.5	685	210.45%
HDD	WD 200GB, 7200rpm, 8MB, SATA	125		542.5	734	135.3%
Video	ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB	230		998.2	1225	122.72%

I've used www.zap.co.il for local prices as it's the industry's standard here, but I have to say the site is horrible compared to Anand's. Numbers are fairly reliable, though.

I write no conclusions, as this is self explanatory.

Personal - back online, whoohoo!!!

So, I've ordered a new motherboard. I've collected it and am now back online.

<Boring>
Back in mid-2000, I've bought a brand spanking new Coppermine Pentium III 550E (with the new 0.18um die from the fab in Qiryat-Gat, which I've visited) which they only had in the then-new socket-370 format. But they didn't yet have motherboards with the new socket, so I've bought a Slot-A mobo and a "slotcket" - a device that allows one to connect a socket CPU to a slot motherboard.
Well, it died. But, since they stopped needing these a few months after I've bought mine (the new motherboards compatible with the new processors came out) they stopped making them more than 4 years ago, which is a very long time for hardware parts. In fact, they are so rare these days, it's significantly cheaper to just buy a socket-370 motherboard (which too is the last of its kind, but at least it's from 2002, not 2000!). That's exactly what I've done.
</Boring>

Lou: 1$ payraise. I kid you not. The three years males are obligated to serve in Israel, we get less than 80$ per month.

Sgt. Yevgenii Shmurak crashed his car full speed into a light pole early Saturday morning, while returning from someone's birthday party. He was in the car with his girlfriend and some other friend. He was rushed to the hospital but died shortly afterwards. The friend and the girlfriend are seriously injured. He was an only child and left two completely heart broken parents. He was 21 years old, RIP.
Genya and I were best friends in 4th to 6th grades (I was 9 - 11 years old).
Update: Later I found out the girlfriend didn't make it either. :-(

I don't know what else. It's late and I have to be up early to go to Eilat with my unit (rant will follow surely).

On to Kokopelli's The Letters of Summer.

Fun

… is building imaginary computers I can’t afford. Building real computers I can’t afford was also fun – but then I had to let the people who could afford them but knew not what to do with them (that is because those people have spent their time making money instead of learning about computers) treat those beautiful machines badly. The trick is to build a value rig in the price/performance sweet spot – one that won’t be obsolete too soon and when its optimal time to be replaced comes, the financial investment of its purchase won’t make it too painful. It must be possible to order from reputable local merchants featuring next day next to free delivery and easy RMAs. Technical specs are preferred to brand loyalty, underdogs are supported and overclocking possibilities are speculated about with great fervor. The poor Israeli PC enthusiast’s wet dream:

Part	Brand	Model	Price per unit	# units	Total price
CPU	AMD	Athlon 64 3000+ (socket-754, retail)	1420	1	1420
Motherboard	ASUS or Abit	K8V Deluxe or KV8-MAX3	850	1	850
Video card	ATI	Radeon 9600XT 128MB	1130	1	1130
RAM	Infineon	DDR-400 512MB	470	2	940
Hard drive	Maxtor	DiamonMax Plus 9 SATA (7200rpm, 8MB) 120GB	620	1	620
				Total:	4960

Prices are in New Israeli Shekels. Contact info of supplier withheld because I don’t work for them.

For the sake of all the confused souls who read mine and Melissa's Mac warz, I have done some research on the commercial (rather than the technical) aspect of the debate, hoping most readers will be able to deal with these numbers and understand what I'm getting at: Macs are good computers. They're easy, and they really work. Most of the time. More than PCs, I think. But they cost a lot more. And perform a lot less. And they restrict your choice about what you can and can't do with your own computer in a way that makes me very uncomfortable.

So here is my research, plain and simple. Read it and make your own conclusions.

	PC	Mac
CPUs	2 x AMD Athlon MP 2200+	2 x PowerMac G4 1000
Motherboard	Tyan S2460 Server board	Dual G4 board w/ Xscale
RAM	Samsung 512MB PC2700	512MB PC2700
Video	Leadtek GF4Ti4600	GF4Ti4600
Hard drive	Maxtor 80GB QuietDrive	80GB
Optical	Lite-On 40x12x48 CDRW & 16x48 DVD-ROM	16x10x8x32 Combo drive
Sound	Creative Audigy w/ IEEE-1394 (aka FireWire) port	Some sound
LAN	LNE100TX 5.1 10/100	na
Keyboard / Mouse	Microsoft Natural Keyboard + IntelliMouse Explorer v3a	some keyboard, 1 button mouse
Case	Enermax FS-501B, Black	Cute case
display, speakers, portable music player, wireless LAN, modem, SCSI	na	na
Total:	$1,408.00 from newegg.com	$2,720.00 from store.apple.com

In case you thought I was cutting costs or the PC system doesn't quite stack up with the Mac:

• AMD's K7 x86 CPUs have killer floating point units. See: here (notice the benchmarks are for the 1900+ while here we have the 2200+)
• Tyan is the world leader in server-class mission critical motherboards.
• Samsung RAM has the best reputation for longevity and low latency.
• Leadtek constantly produces best performing and coolest (as in, the opposite of "warm") running video cards.
  BTW, if I was really buying a PC, I'd have opted for a GF4Ti4200 card, because it is not much slower, but costs only $130 compared to $240 with the 4600. Apple won't let me choose, so in this comparison I used the pricier card, although it is already not the performance leader. ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro ($358) is. See: here and here.
• Maxtor's D740X series of IDE drives are the second highest performing drives (Western Digital's WD1200JB ($162) are the first) available. Their Fluid Bearing Motor system makes these drives the quietest of the performance-oriented drives. The 80GB model costs $118. See here for details.
• Lite-On burners have the best overall performance with cloning data and audio CDs while being relatively quiet. The DVD drive is excellent as well. See: here and here.
• Creative's Audigy sound card is the current market leader in home audio equipment. See: every street corner.
• Linksys has a reputation for producing quality cards at much lower prices than Intel's or 3Com's. Techs worldwide swear by those cards.
• Microsoft's keyboards and mice are second only to Logitech's, while some people claim the exact opposite is the truth.
• Enermax is world leader in quality cases for "regular" use (Lian-Li specialize in "cool" cases). Their PSUs are considered to be the best of the currently available.

Note I used a single company/shop to get all the parts. Using this site, it is possible to find much lower prices for the parts I have listed, but that makes shipping and warranty a bit more complicated so I avoided it in this comparison.

Don't forget to look at the benchmarks.

I rest my case.

The MacRant (You can skip the techy parts if you want to):

--- START TECH SPEAK ---

I just loaded http://www.apple.com/powermac/, and read the highlights:

• "Dual PowerPC processors" - so get Dual Athlon MP 2200+. It will smoke the G4.
• "Double Data Rate SDRAM" - d'oh. But what speed? DDR266, DDR333 or DDR400? On the PC, you can run all kinds. And it will smoke the Xserve.
• "Dual optical drives" - how about 4?
• "four hard drives" - ok. IDE or SCSI? PC can support up to 12 devices out of the box, btw, when using motherboards with this feature. On a Mac, you can't choose.
• "four PCI cards" - minimum of 5, generally 6 on PCs.
• "upto 2GB of SDRAM" - likewise, on better motherboards (again, on a PC you _can_ choose) it's 3GB.
• "GF4 or Radeon" - which Radeon? But anyway, it's the same stuff by the same companies (nVidia and ATI). Just that for the PC, there are about 20 manufacturers offering different features for different prices. On a Mac - only 2 choices.

--- END TECH SPEAK ---

Computers crash for two reasons - faulty hardware and buggy software. On a Mac, you are unlikely to have poor quality hardware, because it all comes from almost exclusively a single manufacturer and nothing is "budget oriented". You can get the same quality stuff (and even better, you can get corporate grade stuff suitable for mission critical servers) for the PC, but unless you've built your own computer you can't make sure someone won't try to cut costs.
On the software side, there is a paradox: although there is much more good software for the PC, operation systems included, the most popular one is a real POS. It is slowly getting better though, so now XPSP1 is pretty much stable for all intents and purposes in a home/SOHO environment, but if you really want a rock solid system, POSIX is the only way to go. And here, the choices are limitless:

--- START TECH SPEAK ---

All flavors of BSD (OS X is based on BSD), GNU/Linux, some other things. The good part is that those systems are endlessly customizable and configurable. You can run a shell and windowing manager (the GUI) that is as nice and as feature rich as Darwin (OS X) and as powerful and pretty as KDE3.

--- END TECH SPEAK ---

You can adjust its hunger for system resources to make it work smoothly on any kind of system built in the last 4 years and still maintain all its features. That's the beauty of the non-proprietary system: you can exchange parts for something better suiting your needs. Yes, making all those adjustments requires a tech. Sometimes even a Software Engineer. But he only has to do it once, and then all grandmas can get the distribution from the net.

As far as the Mac's stability in concerned: your mileage may vary, as they say. According to RJA, Macs are as unstable as a win98-operated budget PC.

Viruses are more common on PCs than on Macs because there are much more PCs. And anyway, real viruses are almost extinct in the wild. The viruses you've heard about in the recent years are all macro viruses that can only spread on Microsoft software. That means, again, the email client and word processor/spreadsheet are at fault, not the platform or the hardware. Not even the OS. Abandon Microsoft and you can forget about viruses.

Macs are simpler to operate, yes. But they are also much more restricting. I will not be physically able to do all the stuff I do with my PC on a Mac unless I take the job of programming it myself. On the PC scene, I can find readily available software for everything imaginable. And peripherals "just work" on winXP as well, if you buy name brands. Of course, on a Mac, everything has to be certified, so it will have to work. But, there is less choice.

Another thing is that the Mac community is much smaller. That means it is less likely some person who faced the same problems you face has already found a solution (or, made the solution) and made it available to you, for free, on the web.

It's like instead of watching regular TV you can only get pre-approved taped shows from last week, making sure you only get the good stuff and it's suitable to your age, but it's only about 2 hours of "quality TV" per day. And if the company decides they don�t want you to watch some specific show - you're out of luck because there is no way to switch the tape on your end. It's good, it's easy, it doesn�t require you to think, and you pay for it in money and being forced to comply with the powers that be.
On the PC, you are your own boss. You don�t like what Dell offers? No problems - check out any of its competitors or, if you're savvy enough - build your own computer, learn some stuff, and save money while you're doing it. I can assure you that I can build a PC surpassing a Mac in price, performance, stability and features at any price point and/or specific requirements. And if the user is willing to not use Microsoft software, it will never crash and be even faster.

Macs are not refined PCs, they are restrictive, backwards, high cost, grandma-oriented systems and they suck.