For one of Karen's school projects, she asked me for a ballpark figure on how much it would cost to build a Web server. I told her around $400, since a Web server doesn't need fancy audio or video cards, or even a monitor, keyboard or mouse.

One of her professors denigrated her proposal in front of the whole class, contemptuously declaring that it would cost at least $1000 for a server powerful enough to run Drupal (his preferred content-management system).

So I ran some specific numbers. At today's prices, and not taking into account any special offers or combo deals, I can get the following from Newegg:

• ASUS M2N-MX SE motherboard - $54.99
• AMD Athlon64x2 5200+ Windsor core CPU - $119.00
• G.SKILL 2GB DDR 800 RAM - $85.99
• Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive - $64.99
• RAIDMAX Scorpio ATX-868WSP case w/ 420W PS - $50.00

Total cost with shipping added: $398.78. And this is for a machine with a faster CPU than my personal graphics/audio workstation (and the same amount of RAM, albeit half the disk space), using only components from companies I've had positive experiences with. This is also a more powerful machine than one which (according to the Drupal forums) survived a simultaneous Slashdotting and Digging with no problems. But nevertheless it's $600 shy of being powerful enough to run an English department Web site?

I guess maybe being a university English professor doesn't give you expertise in every field after all.