OK, I'll pull the trigger on a PC, please advise.
 

Please don't start a Mac/PC war here. I've decided to buy a PC. Money. It's that simple to me. And I'm a believer in "you get what you pay for." But 2000 vs. under a grand is too difficult to get around. And, I got some preety good software waiting to be used that won't work on a Mac. One of those is the Norton security suite. (Too big for my current machines to run, so NIB.)

Down to the questions:

Seems Dell came up in the last discussion. Good enough?

I want to rip a lot of music for iPod use and also burn CD's. (Yeah, I know, you've had a dual drive for 5 years. Well, I haven't) Also do some video work, but mostly mindless transfer. Dell 512 enough?

Analog 15' flat panel, enough? Right format? You know, [u]xxx]/u] x xxx

Other recommendations? 512 memory gonna get it, or should I double that right away (when ordering)?

Custom build vs. off the shelf? Support? (I haven't had to call or go online for support in 7 years, gotta like the old stuff)

Anything else? Will do this tomorrow, hopefully online.

Zeke,

Buy as much as you can afford on RAM and hard drive speed and space. A 7200 rpm hd will give you faster data throughput than a 5400 rpm drive, and memory is cheap so if you can swing 1 gig RAM, do it.

A 60 to 80 gig hard drive minimum. I have two 120 gig drives in my machine and they are half full. You can add a second HD later for a descent price if you need room.

RAM and hard drive speed and space is more important than processor speed, unless you are doing a lot of complicated spreadsheet or math work IMHO.

Unless you really want a custom machine, and are ready to pay for it, its not needed IHMO.

No, 15" is not large enough. Get a 17" flat screen at a min and if the price is right add a second later on (yes, two screens, I have three at home on mine and could not live without it) that is at least 17" or even 19" flat screen.

If you are going to copy or burn CD's/DVD's, get dual drives. They cost under $50 these days for a CD/DVD reader. Get one good burner and a second reader, that way you put the disk to be copied in one drive and burn off of the second at the same time.

Dell is one of the best and their support has been good in my case. You can get the extended support or I always pay for things like this with my AmEx card. It doubles the warranty for FREE, so two years for free. Check with your credit card about this coverage, usually its free.

Zeke, Dell is good stuff. With the exception of one university, all our clients run Dell on the desktop, if not server room as well.

Here is a good deal:
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=4d51w12&s= bsd
Upgraded to 512 Mb of ram, a DC burner and a 19" LCD, it is $700.

2 things. 1.) You have to represent yourself as a small business user. 2.) Upgrade to the 19 LCD monitor. You can never have enough screen space in my opinion.

Dell is absolute unmitigated steaming garbage.

Well, I knew that would come out at some point. Anything mass produced for the gigazillions of users is gonna have its faults. But, maybe you could be more constructive and help me here, not simply intimidate me.

I'm pretty conservative (I'm not talking about politics), a lot older than most of you guys, and I have little patience and a bit of a temper as everyone knows by now. One thing that has kept these ol' timers on by desks is their reliability. I could keep this up forever, but they don't meet my current needs.

That, and some of you made fun of me for even having Win98 on a PII with so little RAM. OK, I'll move up. I said that a year ago. I never did.

I came on here looking for a consensus. That's all. No need to be negative.

Build it yourself and save lots of $$$. Components are easy to find, snap together and Windows XP sets it all up for you. I have built two systems and not had a problem with either one.

Ditto to Joe. I have a few Dells here and many at work. Best buy for the money IMO. You can check the Yahoo's home page and Slickdeals.net for great deals. Yahoo usually has one deal ona week.

To add, I'd go with a 60-80 gig HD to start then buy a 320-400 gig unit on sale afterwards. They are very inexpensive ad it'll take little effort to add on. That should cover you for a bit.

This from Yahoo/shopping/computers (featured on MSN as well): http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/odg_special49?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs


300 Gig Seagate (SATA) for $110: http://www.slickdeals.net/#p6952

If you are going with dell, then get the Optiplex - you may have to buy as a small business, but that way you get the next day on site warranty. Get 1gb of RAM, and get it in a single slot on the board if possible.

Or for $1k get a Mac mini, and a 19" (non mac branded) flat panel, with some money left over....

Rick, I don't have the time to do that and I don't know who would trouble shoot it if there were any conlficts in the system.

Actually, I would like to build one. It's just a time thing. It would probably take me all day just to buy the components. Do you guys have Fry's in TX? This is the biggest goat rope around. If you know exactly what you want and never have to return anything, they are viable and the prices seem very good. The selection is awesome, in the literal sense of the word, compounding the problem.

Frys' has a lot of Sony Viao stuff which you don't see everywhere.

Can't resist:

Apple Certified Refurbished iBook G4 12-inch
Refurbished iBook G4 1.2GHz/ 256MB/ 30GB/ CD/ E/ 56K/ 12-inch TFT

• Save 23% off the original price
Original price: $899.00
Your price: $699.00

(Warranty is the same as a new unit). No need for antivirus; no problems with worms, trojans, etc. Support is available in person at the "Genius Bar" at any Apple store -- regardless of warranty coverage.

I've run my business on Macs for 18 years, and have often had PCs alongside them. I currently have a Dell with P4, 2.54 GHz. It was about $499 on special a couple of years back. That's without monitor, of course. It's about 20X more likely to crash or hang than the Mac.

Dell's reputation is that as long as it works, you're fine. If you need anything from them, ever, you can be in for a world of hurt. I had an acquaintance get his attorney involved in communicating with Dell and was ultimately able to get Dell to buy back their PC.

But anecdotes aren't that useful.

Here's a large study that looks to be about a year and a half old:

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,118514,pg,3,00.asp

I would find a local PC Club (http://www.pcclub.com/) and buy one of their systems. My gaming system is from them, it has worked fine, and if it breaks I take it two blocks away and they'll fix it.

Forget Dell...

The time I understatnd. I think your underestimating your ability. With XP it's pretty much plug and play.

Don't want to push you though.

Yeah, we have one of those nearby. Near Cal State LB. I bet they like to locate near universities.

I agree. We have purschase 400+ dells in the past 18 months. The 270s we bought had a defect in the motherboard. Dell informed us of the problem and backed it with on site service when their were failures. Buy your way into the business support.

Some above have ripped Dell, but there is a reason network engineers (such as myself) are religous about them. Support.

Minimum specs:

CPU: 2.4-2.8 ghz
Memory: 1024mb
Drive: 7200 IDE (7200 SATA preferred)
DVD burner
Windows XP pro

Whatever you do, dont buy an HP.. this is abot a laptop, but I'e had numerous problems wih HP desktops as well

Within 6 months of purchase, here's what happened.

Power supply failed, NOT covered under warranty.

Power supply input plug on back failed, was told it would be 5 weeks to fix and return.

expansion port input popped out of the computer simply by plugging in the cable. Wasnt even soldered to the board, was held in by 1/16 thick tension clips.

RAM slots would not recognize the chipsets. A computer guy I know was able to fix this.

the protective layer of whatever on the surface of the mouse on the front wore off within a few weeks.

Plus, HP's tech support is a joke, they cant answer any question you give them, they put you on hold for 5 minutes, then tell you they would have to see it.



I bit the bullet and bought a Toshiba, and I haven had any problems since.


As for desktops, I built my own. The local PC Club has been INCREDIBLY helpful, cant stress that enough, was able to get everything I needed for around $500.

Avoid Fry's like the plauge.

Try these guys for a quote

http://www.directron.com/tcwo.html

They used to be called Thompson Compter Warehouse

Tell them what you want and they will recommend all the components and even assemble it for a small fee. This way you can choose, with their help, each of the components rather than relying on Dell to choose for you. I have 5 or 6 Dells and while they all work just fine - I find them slow despite the specs. The custom rig I put together costs more but has been super fast and bulletproof for 2 years. Tech supports are a waste of time - thats what Google is for.

FWIW I've used Dell desktops and servers for MANY years (1992 was the first one I believe) in my business with virtually ZERO problems (caused by Dell).

I've never been a fan of their laptops - but haven't seen/used their latest ones - we've standardized on Thinkpads and also been extremely happy with them.

I have custom built my last 4+ machines at home and it's not that hard and is the 'ideal' way to get exactly what you want but am NOT convinced it is a way to save money. Just a current (higher end) motherboard and CPU from an internet parts house is about as expensive as an entire system from the big guys like Dell.

For instance this machine here (getting a tad old) is a dual-Pentium3 1.1GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI 9600XT video card (upgraded later), Seagate 7200rpm 300GB EIDE drive, etc...upgrading its guts to current specs like a PCI-E motherboard, P4 dual core, nice PCI-E video card, SATA drive etc. would be well over a grand. So I am seriously considering buying the next one pre-built (and then maybe hotrodding it a bit more.

For Milt or anybody else looking, definitely do not underestimate the hard drive storage you'll need if you get heavily into video and/or music! This machine I'm on right now has a 300GB drive and it's approaching full... Also be sure to get a FAST hard drive as you can have the most kickass CPU in the world but you'll have a dog system on your hands if the I/O subsystem can't pump the data...

I'm also a convert to LCD monitors. Looking at a Viewsonic VP211b (21") right now which I really like a lot. If you go to a flatpanel you will want to run it digitally (DVI) and in its native LCD resolution for best results so make sure your video card supports that.

Last advice is don't forget about some way to BACKUP your important data. A CD or DVD-burner might cut it if all you feel is 'crucial' is stuff like work documents, Quicken files etc...however think how painful it would be if you lost many years worth of pics or music files. External USB hard drives are a pretty nice option for backup. You can periodically dupe your whole system contents on them and then unplug and toss in a safe/closet.

Dell's support on their servers has been good for me, but the support and reliability on the Dell-branded EMC SAN we bought has kept me at work until 3 AM on more than one occasion...

ianc

I've built my own machines since the early 90's. By that I mean I assembled components, I didn't build the motherboards etc..

Last year I found a Dell box on eBay with a dual bus motherboard supporting the latest 875p chipset along with a P4 3.2ghz Intel cpu for $400. Just the Intel cpu was selling for $450 at the time so I couldn't resist the bargain. The bios on this mb isn't overclockable, but I'm not the gamer I used to be and I'm happy with it. I added memory, video, dvd burner, etc etc...

But if you want a stable machine and on-site support, Dell isn't a horrible way to go.

Before I got the PowerBook for school (which was a smart move, some friends that got PCs have sent them out for tech support and been PC-less for a month), I had a Dell desktop. It was quite good for 5 years, absolutely no hardware issues. The OS did it for me...reformatting the C: drive and having Windows slow down again after just a month was unacceptable.