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Well, I spent countless hours debating if I would build a PC, or just save myself that hassle and buy one. I priced out a system I wanted on Dell's website. This was for a system with the following specs:

• Pentium 4 1.8 GHZ
• 512 MB RDRAM (Rambus)
• 60 or 80 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• CD-RW
• Intel Chipset (I don't trust the others, and for good reason)
• 1394 Firewire
• Geoforce4 Ti 4400 or 4600

Here was the Dell Price:

So let's see how I did. I was able to salvage the following parts from another PC:

• CD-RW
• 1394 Firewire
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Windows XP Professional (hey, I work for Microsoft! this costs me $30)

And the total cost came to:

So I managed to save myself about $268. There were a few differences. Dell wasn't offering me the new .13 micron Intel Pentium 4 1.8A processor. For the difference between the "A" series and the regular .18 micron chips check out this article. I also got an Intel 850MV motherboard with Rambus memory and LAN. I went with Intel because I don't trust all those other hokey motherboards. At least with Intel you know you are getting good old American quality.

This processor is the main reason I built a Pentium computer vs. the cheaper Athalon. My roommate has an Athalon XP right now and I have a few issues with it. Primarily, it's big, power hungry and noisy. The new Intel .13 micron chip is really small. Plus because it's Intel you know that there are all kind of optimizations for Windows. Bottom line, this processor screams. My PC boots in under 15 seconds.

Now, did I pay a price for the $268 savings? Well don't you always when you build a PC? What went wrong for me? Well it was the fact that I wanted to take advantage of the new S3 Standby Mode (other wise known as Suspend To Ram). Intel calls this Instantly Available PC.

Well the problem for me was that even though all my hardware supported this, I installed Windows XP with the BIOS set to the S1 state (which is regular old standby). S3 is a setting that needs to be enabled. By doing so, the computer can go into standby mode drawing only 5 watts. The benefit is that the computer appears to be off, but resumes from standby in a few seconds. It's bliss.

Well, I spent 4 hours troubleshooting this problem. Eventually I found some google post that indicated that if you install XP in S1 mode you can never get the OS to sleep in S3 mode. There is a command line tool called DUMPPO.EXE that Microsoft makes available in some OEMs that allows you to test out all the standby functions of the PC. However, when set the S3 mode like so:

DUMPPO AC MAXSLEEP=S3

Then it works. Of course I didn't find this out until after taking my PC apart, putting it back together and so on. However, the problem is when you reboot, this setting is reset to S1 again. Oh well, so much for not re-installing XP. I'm doing that now.

Why oh why do things like this have to happen? I just sent some mail around Microsoft to find out why there isn't any mention of this anywhere on the web. Intel doesn't mention it, and Microsoft doesn't have a Knowledge Base article describing the problem. Maybe it's because they don't want anyone to use this feature?

Update: well it turns out that my hack above only worked during the current session but then reset after a reboot. I had to re-install the OS after all.