I was asking for laptop advice earlier and that situation has been put on the back burner for a little while. Now what I need is desktop advice.
Should I build my own? I have a friend that built his own, but I don’t know if I can cope with out the tech suppert for when things go wrong.
Here is the situation: I need only the box (no monitor, or accesories) Do I need an OS if I have copies of windows that will be decommissioned with my old computer? Do I need new copies of office?
I have about $1,300 to spend on this new system. How should I configure it?
Building your own make some sense if you’re building a higher-end gaming system and need to choose motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc. based on their ability to be overclocked without frying, need to do some CPU watercooling, or other semi-exotica. Going this route usually costs more (possibly a lot more) than the $1300 you mention. In general it seems that the bigger vendors can get better prices on components than you can, so even a bare bones system you assemble will probably cost you more than a comparable system bought from a vendor. For most garden-variety uses (email, office, web browsing, most home / small business apps) system hardware reliability and the quality of vendor tech support (if you expect to need it) will matter much more than the exact mix of components. The various PC magazines and Consumer Reports periodically run articles on consumer ratings of the major vendors (HP, Dell, Apple, etc.). Another option is to find a local computer shop with an in-house hardware tech. If they are any good you can pick their brains about what components are more reliable than others, and these places can build and service a semi-custom system for you. A real advantage of these places is that you can actually bring the misbehaving hardware into the shop and demonstrate the problem in person instead of trying to describe it over the phone to someone that is primarily graded on how many problems they can “resolve” (i.e., get rid of) in an hours’ time.
What are your primary uses for the system, and which version of Windows are you thinking of putting on the new system? It’s been a while since I read a EULA but it’s probably OK to move the OS from one to another. You will need the original boot / install media and product keys to do a re-install.
If your old one was not a Dell, or possibly other manufactures your copy of windows should work on the new machine, and as long as the old machine is decommissioned I believe it is legal, to install on another machine.
Well 1,300 with no monitor, or OS could build you one hell of a machine these days. Not sure the details of your old machine but would you want a new HD or is the old one acceptable?
Or 1,300 with no monitor but an OS can buy a very, very nice Dell or others.
Not sure what your needs are, I would assume if your looking to spend that kind of money you either are big into gaming, or video/graphics editing, otherwise you should be able to walk away with some of your cash left.
I’m really looking to upgrade my old dell. It is 5+ yrs old and has the dreaded Rambus for memory. I currently have 512 installed and have to wait about 45 sec for programs to load (a real headache when I’m on the phone with a customer and have to pull up his quote). I’m constantly running out of memory and dont feel like it is worth the $600 to install 2gb.
I really don’t do any gaming, but find that I have a habit of keeping a lot of windows open at the same time which bogs down the system. I’m trying to plan for the future when programs take up more memory and more CPU grunt. Pretty much te same thing that I did when I bought this system, and with out the inconvienient truth that I economically can’t upgrade the RAM this woudl still be a fine computer.
I think now that I will get a new OS and just migrate (reinstall) my copy of office. I’ve put together a pretty nice Dell XPS that I think I might settle on (Core2Duo/2.4gb/250gb/tvtuner/Mediacennter) for about that $1300 mark.
I do plan on doing video editing on the new box (home movies and such) and just want to not run into the same problems with upgradeability in the future. Is ther anyway to know if this version of ram (ddr2sdram) is going to be another Rambus fiasco?
2GB of DDR2 shouldn’t cost $600 - see http://www.pricewatch.com/memory/pc5400_ddr_2gb.htm . Memory >= 1GB (especially if you only had 512MB) will do more for system performance than almost anything else, since it will drastically reduce the amount of paging your system does, which is orders of magnitude slower than straight memory access. DDR2 memory is available from a wide variety of independent sources, so I don’t expect any RAMBUS-like problems.
Thanks, the new box that I’m about to buy will have ddr2 ram, the one that I have has the rambus. I expect that it will be some time before I have to buy more ram for the new one. If I had only checked the upgradeability of my current machine when I bought it I would not be in the prediciment;-)
BTW I blame the latest version of iTunes for my most recent slowdown. Well, that and the huge amount of memory that IE open in multiple pages uses.