Well, when you get one from gateway or some similar place, far as I know, you get the hole system, but building my own or having them built, I use my old monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers, not to mention I can have it built to my specs and not stuck with what they give me and I find that I pay even having them built for me, about 1 third of what I would with the same thing at gateway. Also, I found me a sound blaster live card I liked and have brought it with me through the last 2 computers, it's actually the sound blaster live platinum which I find works great with jaws. I suppose if you don't like any toys and you just like a basic machine it might be close in price to have one built as from gateway or some one, but I like a lot of stuff, my memory card reader, I like a CD/DVD writer as 1 CD drive and I like a basic one too for copying and all, also now a lot of new computers don't come with floppy disk drives, those of us that build computers still put them in and that helps with JFW, I know it can be requested but you'll pay for it. Another thing I find, if you have one built, it's all generic parts, if you need something fixed or want to add on to it or upgrade it, you can have just anyone do it where as Gateway, Dell, and other companies make it so you have to use their stuff for the most part so that can be a pain especially if it's out of warranty and they want to charge you just to talk to you. As for sound cards to recommend, I'd say the sound blaster cards are all good, pretty much anything these days, only one I've had trouble with is the onboard card, VIA AC-97 but beyond that, I had an old turtle beach card here that worked very well, my sound blaster card in this one and the other one in my backup computer is good. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joy" <happyhappyjoyjoy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 6:59 PM Subject: Re: jaws/new computer > How do you know what will and won't work with jaws? Are there any certain > types of soundcards that shouldn't be used? A long time ago I checked > into > having one built and the cost was comparable to one from Gateway, so are > there any benefits to doing so? -- To post a message to the list, send it to jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send a message to jfw-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. Archives located at: //www.freelists.org/archives/jfw If you have any concerns about the list, post received from the list, or the way the list is being run, do not post them to the list. Rather contact the list owner at jfw-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx