take something good (say, your DVD drive or your printer), put it in poo and your something good becomes poo too
I agree - but...
COMPAQ: yes
Dell: sometimes
Apple: no!

Compaq and Dell are full of interns trying to mash products out to sway the retarded home users...
Sway... sway as in rock to and fro in a languorous stupor and then keel over?
Yes. :-D

To get a good computer -> Read Forums about hardware, carefully pick each component
I take this opportunity to note that Microsoft has a hardware compatibility list while Linux has a hardware incompatibility list.

order from newegg.com, put together parts as they arrive... This works amazingly well compared to the POS you get from Compaq/Dell. Yes, Yes, a little more work in the beginning finding out where hardware conflicts can arise, etc... etc...
Ah, but... but wait... Plummer, Kieffaber, and masaga just convinced me to buy COTS! From Dell, even!

I said "Dell?", they said "good", what say you?

--
Banazir

YES!!! Ok, Ok, fine.. purple poo... see zerovector's notes
I read. Far be it from me to gainsay another person's bad experience, but you will notice that I am not so much buying the G4 PowerBooks as owning some decent G4 desktops. The rack mounts are slightly-overpriced, HPC systems with nice RAID, like any other thin cluster unit. The iMacs (DVs on up; I agree that Yosemites and below, like my Este, are fruity poo) are digital video editing systems.

The iBooks, such as Willow Rosenberg's, are eye candy.

I forget whether yodge is using an iBook or PowerBook, but I recommended a Mac to her given that she is going to use it especially for desktop publishing.

Apple has a cultish following which prevents them from being any good; they put poo out, and like a fetish, apple users eat it up.
Dude. Do you not know who I am?

Back in HS I was known as The Mac Nut. I went around with copies of Mac User in my suitcase (MacWorld was a little oversized then).

The poo was evangelized by Kawasaki, smelt by Dvorak, and cleaned up by my generation! I started computing on a 512K Fat Mac, continued with a Plus, and continued on to an SE (the first of the three with a hard drive - 20Mb in 1988, kept until 1999).

I followed Apple from 1985 through all the years when my uncle (yes, he who is now VP of Interactive Services, head of of .NET's UI division, and in all wise a Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01) was at Apple (1990-1996, with Sculley, Spindler, Amelio). I watched the releases of his group's products: QuickTime, QuickTime VR, the Newton, PlainTalk. I knew what was poo and what wasn't (QT wasn't).

You think Marathon and Three in Three are old?
They're not old. Strategic Conquest and Original Pirates!... those are old. Pararena, that's old.

ImageWriter! Dark Castle (nye-nye-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh! yeah! oof-oof-wheeenh-yow!) and Beyond Dark Castle (augh! ssshewwhh!) Transylvania!

World Builder! Crystal Quest!

Original Photoshop!
Mac Minix, you aftercomer! *wields Tanenbaum 1e*

Back! Back!
*swings MFS-to-HFS conversion utilities and Disinfectant*
*holds out Limited Edition Classic Newton like a crucifix*

--
Banazir
(the Power of Jobs compels you! KNEEL BEFORE WOZ!)

The HP PSC 1210 has turned out to be a great little printer... (good image quality, good scanning, great size {called HP shoebox on my network})

how much time have you spent trying to fix POS computers? ... say, the compaq you are working on now?

Highly-Piled!
(Ahh, just had to assert my grammar whorepimpdom.)

All-in-Ones tend to be a bit like Swiss Army knives and their clones.
Yes, I know.

The very best ones are handy only because they're small and don't take up as much room as full sized versions.
Plus, they are cheep and plug-and-print when you have the right system on which to use them.

At their worst, they're pieces of crap that do many things and none of them satisfactorily.
Nyeh. I just need one working scanner and one color printer.

--
Banazir