New Computer

[BillyP]

I'm fixin to order myself a new computer. Any ideas on what I should add to the list of options?

Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.66GHz with 533MHz front side bus

Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition

512MB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 333MHz

80GB Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive (7200 RPM)

3.5 in Floppy Drive

16X DVD ROM Drive

8x DVD+R/+RW Drive with CD-RW (for purchase with 16X DVD-ROM Drive)

128MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Graphics Card with TV-Out and DVI

Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 (D) Card with Dolby® Digital 5.1 capability

IEEE 1394 card (firewire)

Integrated Intel® PRO 10/100 Ethernet

56K PCI Telephony Modem

17 in (16 in viewable,.27dp) E773c CRT Monitor

 

[Bob_Skurka]

First, I prefer Apple but if I can't sway you away from the Dark Side, then I would suggest several things that we no longer bother with at our office, eliminating them could save you some money and certainly will not affect the machine speed.

Nobody bothers with 3.5" floppy disks anymore. Eliminate it and save the money.

XP Home Edition is a huge mistake, get XP Pro. Check with MS, they are eliminating some of their support for some versions, make sure you get a version that is still being suppored. I am sure XP Pro is one of those. However, we had a couple laptops that came with XP Home Edition and it was nothing but grief. We ended up reformatting the drives to clear out all the junk and installing XP Pro.

Unless you have some logical reason for it, skip the DVD Rom drive, you already spec'ed a DVD burner, having both is redundant, added cost, and can cause conflicts. I see no reason for both, and if some time in the future you need both, you can get an external unit to tie into your Firewire port. But I can't imagine needed both.

Firewire is very cool and awesome for video transfer, but don't forget USB 2.0

If you have broadband, skip the 56k modem completely. And since you are including ethernet, I presume you have broadband.

Skip the 17" CRT monitor and go to a 15" LCD. The 15" LCD has a viewable 15" screen, the 17" CRT will have a viewable screen that is about 15.5" and it will take up a HUGE amount of desk space, it also tosses off lots of heat, builds up static electricity which draws in dust, and is generally not very desirable anymore. However, they are pretty darn cheap now so if money is the issue. Then again, by casing off some of the unneeded hardware like the Floppy Drive and the CD drive you probably save enough to upgrade to the LCD.

The 80 gig drive is nice, but what are you going to back it up to? You have no back up. You might want to consider a back up drive. I have a Firewire 80 gig drive that I back my system files and changed files up to; you might want to consider something to protect all that data.

The other thing I would strong recommend against is buying from someone who builds them in a storefront shop or a garage. I know there are different opinions on this, but our company's experience with these small shops is that they often use 1) Proprietary Parts that are harder to upgrade later; and/or 2) when we test their items for speed, they often fail miserably compared to virtually any of the mid-size to big name brands.


BUT IF IT WAS ME, I would skip all that stuff you specified and buy a fast laptop with a DVD burner and connect it to your internet connection via WiFi. I have a couple of those and set up a bi-directional satellite internet connection in my house connecting the laptops to the satellite via WiFi and we no longer even use the main computer (I actually took it out about a month ago).

 

[BubbaJr]

There's only one thing I have needed with every computer purchase. And that's an extra large bottle of Advil. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[jwstewar]

Just a couple of quick comments, make sure the 512 MB of memory is on one stick so that you can upgrade later and not have to toss out your old memory. I know (especially Dell) only have 2 memory slots and if they are full your full.

The other one is the DVD+RW anyway to upgrade to to a DVD+/-RW? I always forget which is the more common format, but you also want to make sure your DVD player will handle the format that you write your DVDs in.

Other than that sounds like a pretty decent system. I just recently swapped out my SoundBlaster Live! for a SoundBlaster Audigy so that it would give me Firewire capability - pulled it out of another machine so that it was a freebie upgrade.

Have fun you'll enjoy. Don't know what you are upgrading from, but I went from an AMD Athlon 500 to a P4 2.4 w/ the 533 FSB and 1 GB of PC2700 RAM and man what a difference.

 

[jwstewar]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Skip the 17" CRT monitor and go to a 15" LCD. The 15" LCD has a viewable 15" screen, the 17" CRT will have a viewable screen that is about 15.5" and it will take up a HUGE amount of desk space, )</font>

Depends on what he is doing. If he (or someone in the family) is a true hard core gamer the LCD still aren't fast enough and they will cause some blurring with some of the high action video games.

Another note on the floppy drive, I still use my floppy drive quite a bit. I still have some software on floppies. I also have a Sony Mavica that uses a floppy disks. Another thing to consider is if you have pictures taken at Wal-Mart, Sears or any of these places that do $4.99 picture packages you can buy the proofs on disk - yes floppy. I think Dell charges $20 for a floppy so it isn't a big deal, unless you don't have it and need it.

 

[BobReeves]

I think you have a good set up in the works, I just can't agree with some of the stuff an Apple person would recommend /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif Keep the floppy it may come in handy in a pinch, keep both DVD drives so you can copy CD's and some DVD's easily and if you have the room go for a 19" crt monitor or if you have the extra bucks a 17" LCD.

 

[BIGUN]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( I'm fixin to order myself a new computer. )</font>

From where, so everyone can praise or condemn your choice. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
For the little it saves I would keep the floppy, you never know when you might need it.

 

[Bob_Skurka]

I may be an "Apple person" but I probably buy about 15 Windows systems every year so I am familiar with Windows and I do train people on Windows programs/computers from time to time. So I use both Apple and Windows machines nearly every day.

As for some of the other things, it is true that a gamer would prefer a CRT to an LCD, but that really only applies to the really hard core gamers. I admit to NOT playing games on my computers (cuts into my TractorByNet time) so I don't really consider it a big deal. And most people who use their computers as multi-purpose machines would never see the "blur" because they are not hard core game people. Since there was no mention of a Momo Steering Wheel input device and a 15" sub woofer and brace of Klipsch Surround Sound speakers I didn't figure this to be a hard core game machine.

If money is no object then two DVD units in the machine are fine, illogical, a possible source of hardware conflict, and unnecessary, but if that is how you want to spend money, then fine. To me it only makes sense if you want to burn from one DVD to another DVD and you plan to do ALOT of that, virtually daily or at least evey week. Otherwise I'd just copy to the 80gigHD and then copy back to a blank DVD. The time to copy to a HD is far less than the time it takes to copy DVD to DVD and if you don't have them set to the same speeds you are asking for lots of problems.

As for the 3.5" floppy drives . . . get over it guys, technology moves forward. I suppose you might want to get a 5.25" drive too, just in case, because maybe someday, when the moon is blue and the ladies auxiliary of the local Grange chapter is discussing recipies they might need something thing translated off of an old Commodore 54 or Radio Shack TRS-80 machine!!!!

Still, I'd trade all of that for a well equipped lap top (notice I did not suggest any brand or OS) with built in 802.11g WiFi, a DVD burner, 1 FireWire port and an external hard drive for back ups.

 

[JASTN70D]

First go with the 800 MHz Front side bus about $ 100 upgrade but much faster. floppy drive is about 8-10 bucks. Just like people who build tractors or cars they can chose to use inferior parts or not. It has nothing to do with the size of the company. Look around you. First and foremost its a computer there is a high chance that something will go wrong find some one that will take care of it they way you expect. if that means spending hours on the phone with possibly someone that knows less than you go for the big boys. If you want someone that will show up at your door find a good local reseller and check them out. Also they should be able to advise you better what you need. I take a little exception to the Mack guy comments about slower speed components if you by a 4cylinder you pay for that if you buy an 8 cylinder you pay for that. But so you can compare apples to apples if it is a Intel cpu @ 2.6 GHz then I don't care if you buy it from you mother it is going to be the same speed. There are no companies that build computers they only assemble them.! So the moral of the story is look closely at what your buying Such as CPU Intel 2.6 Hard drive spindle speed 7200 rpm Seagate or Western digital. Chip set Intel you cant go wrong. Also I would recommend you go with the new SATA drives they are faster with very little additional cost. As far as Operating System goes if you going to use it at Home XP home is fine it is the same as pro with out the ability to join a network domain. That is why that they had to remove it. It is and will be supported as long as XP Pro for it is the same product. I suspect the garbage he was referring to was the junk that the manufacture put on the machine to try to make it different than the next guys offering. If you speck the same parts the only difference is the name on the case and how well the service is when you WILL need it. Sorry for going on so long. I hope this helps Good Luck

 

[OkeeDon]

Like BobS, I just switched to a couple of Toshiba laptops with Wireless. They came with CDRom burners, but I don't even need that, because I have all the drives/burners on the older Dell Optiplex, and I only need one set of burners. I'm keeping the Dell in place to serve as the internet server once we get hooked onto Satellite, because from what I've read, you have to hook into Satellite through one computer rather than a router like cable/dsl. Bob, how are yours set up?

We have cable broadband now, but will lose that after we finish building and move to the country.

I also have a Sony Mavica and need a floppy, so I ordered a USB floppy from Tiger Direct ($39, I think) for my laptop. Otherwise, I'll be able to network to the floppy in the Dell.

The Toshibas are nothing spectacular - 2.2ghz Celerons, 15" TFT display, 40gb hard drivers, 256K RAM, XP Home. I have XP PRo on the Dell, but I haven't had any problems with XP Home. The best part about the Toshibas was the price - $799 each at Circuit City after $250 worth of rebates. Only one rebate to a customer, so I bought one under my home address and the other under the commercial property address and business name.

After much soul searching, I went with the 802.11b Wireless at 11 mbits, rather than the newer, and faster, 802.11g. First, I did some research on the external antennas we will be using on our combined 7.5 acres with two houses and a barn/office, shared with my daughter and her family, and found some information that said that g breaks down somewhat with amplification, while b is stable. Also, b is cheaper than g. While I normally like lots of horsepower, I got thinking about how we will use it. 802.11b is way faster than any internet connection, so web surfing will not suffer at the slower speed. Connecting to the other computers for file sharing is not something we do frequently, but even there, it was not so long ago that our Ethernet speed was 10 mbits, and I was happy with that (although 100 is nicer), so I figured I'd be satisfied with 11. Now that I have them set up, I think I made the right choice - they're fast enough.

I left the Dell hardwired to the Wireless switch with 100 mbit connection. I'm going to add a second storage drive to it to serve as a download center, and as an "island" where my wife and I can place files we want to share even if the other's laptop is not around.