PGTT

And no, the 'Dumpster 2000' sadly cannot synthesize voice nor recognize speech like the HAL 9000 series... but it can make mounds and mounds of delicious cole slaw overnight.

Larrytt

My first year we did about $100,000 in hardware . . . last year we topped $250,000. They are just awesome to work with.

Lone Starr (Ivan)

I have a Precision Workstation 410, Dual proc as my main box at home. It's rock solid just like every other Dell I have ever had.

ripsTTer

I'll waste a few minutes on this bait

re: few companies
I'll just retort, all the companies but one I've worked at have used linux (2 of them billion+ revenue companies), They have also used HP UX, solaris, AIX and more.(NT4 for the small stuff).
Look up some of the studies out there, whats the second largest growing server OS? (it aint the other nix's)

re:hardware support crap
What did you try to get support for and from where? (Almost every time I've installed NT on my machines it was more of a pain in the *** then installing redhat/mandrake. Course I am not a NT expert)

Win2k - havent tried it or seen it in my office here yet so I cant comment - have heard good things about it though, will be trying it when I can.

re: X fast
I've not had any problems with X responding. Do you mean the screens seems to halt on you and your input from keyboard and mouse is delayed?
Are you running alot of services and are they being used? What was the config? X default priority isnt set to High and thats a good thing. You can do a renice of 10 if you are trying to get the machine to act more like a workstation than a server and/or there is a flag in the source code that effects task switching that can be changed to speed it up, havent done the later myself though. Even on an old p120 laptop it worked pretty good- course I havent tried to run staroffice on that laptop since it came out.
My old machine used dual PII333's running at 500 128meg ram (256ram now and has a cellII at 8050 in it but going back to dual once I get a asus slocket adapter or change to dual pIII 700-1ghz )-

Video cards used on it and other single cpu machines are ATI rage, v550, matrox marvel 200, and now currently a prophet MX. Had no problems with them.

With my dual proc board(asus-p2bds) it plays mp3's, quake, runs NT4.0! within vmware running its services, runs sendmail, dns, webserver, ssh, acts as firewall/proxy, runs kde/gnome X(rather quickly) while (either downloading the full latest distro or kernel source or even compiling the latest kernel).

I'll be clustering some 486's here at work - for fun mainly.
(Something windows can do? are they there yet?)
I imagine I won't be "needing" to run X on any for the purposes of the cluster(probably use mosix) - I will probably put X on the the main box that will act as a proxy. I dont think I'll have any problems as the guy who worked here was running Kde on one of them old boxes. Although I think I would pick more of less hungry window manager and not use kde.

real OS:
Yes solaris on a sparc machine works wonderful and some of their boxes are even getting cheaper. There are other real OS's of course to (freebsd aint to bad), and Windows (NT,2k) even have alot of good things going for them,
but one of them real OS's just happens to be Linux too.

RoQueTT

Bought 100% Dell for 4 companies (& me) since 1992. 3 on my desk right now!

JES TT

you are looking for more than just a home PC. I can get really competitive pricing on everything out there, not just Compaq. (Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, Enterasys/Cabletron... racks etc. You name it.) I would only be able to sell to business entities but I can assure you a very tight, competitive price. My largest system thus far is a Compaq Storage Works 4 Terabyte System, which the customer is about to double his disk order scaling up to 8 TB in a week or so. (Gotta get those new rims ya' know... But I do sell everything. So if your business needs 10 PC's or more..... I may be a good source for you.