Thanks for giving me the perfect opportunity to demonstrate why you should always go with name-brand quality parts when you have the opportunity.
Say you try to put a brand new hard drive into that 3 year old machine. You probably have to deal with the fact that a BIOS that old has a limitation of 8.4GB, and the full capacity of that new drive won't be recognized, and therefore won't be accessible.
Now, this is an easily fixable situation. You could just go to the motherboard manufacturer's web site and download the latest flash BIOS, flash the BIOS to the newest version, complete with large drive support, and you're off an running.
It's easy if you know who the manufacturer of your motherboard is, since most of the big names continue to support and release new BIOS updates for even their outdated boards.
Good luck finding a barebones system with a motherboard from a name that's known enough that they can afford to continue to support a 3 year old board, much less develop new BIOS updates for it.
Now, if you have, say, an Asus or Abit or Tyan Socket 7 board (probably about what was new 3 years ago), I'd bet dollars to donuts that you'd be able to find BIOS updates for their Socket 7 boards on their web site. They may not be a month old, but I'd be sure they'd at least be new enough to support large drives.
Now, say you bought a barebones system from, say, TigerDirect, where you'd save a lot of money while they packed that generic POS case with generic POS components. Doubtful you'd get much in the way of BIOS updates from TigerDirect. You might get lucky enough to find out who manufactured the motherboard in it, but I'd be it'd be from some small Tiawanese company that doesn't even have a website in English.
It may seem like you're saving money, but in the long run, you're really not.
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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
I guess any future upgrade will involve getting up to 256 MB o' RAM.
