Computer Advice

[Greg Duggan]

Yet another computer questions for the experts.

My home pc has given me trouble for the last time yesterday. I'm pretty sure the boot to the front sealed the deal on getting a new one.

So, what should i get? Our priamry use for the home pc is picture viewing and picture storage, I-Tunes,music storage and Internet browsing. I am leaning toward a lap top because of its portability options.

what should i be looking for as far as the hard drive?

what is enough memory?

were is the best place to purchase?

All input is welcome pros/cons what ever.



Thanks

GregD

 

[Texas Transplant]

I purchased two Dell 'Studio' Series 17's last year. They work fairly well. My wife's lost a hard drive and it had to be replaced, but I had a good backup so no real problems.



Max out the memory. Period. If it's not 'loaded', then have it added.



If you really keep/have a lot of video, pictures and music, then you need LOTS of hard drive space. Also, think about buying a desktop 'backup devive' such as the My Book series or one of the others. I bought 2 (one for each laptop) last year for $109.00 each - and they work great and have already saved our behind.



I bought mine from Best Buy. However, this is something that you should know. The warranty that comes with the Dell's from BEST BUY is with BEST BUY and NOT DELL. I really think if I had it to do all over again, I'd simply buy direct from Dell.



I wouldn't buy an HP unit, but it is simply 'personal' for me as I got laid off from there and understand how HP now runs their company. Someone else can comment on the HP Machines.



Tex

 

[Bill Hamilton]

I concur with Tex on maxing out your memory by ensuring you have enough slots in the laptop to increase the memory if not already installed. With respect to disk capacity you should probably go with at least 500-750 GB BUT make sure you have a backup hard drive with a full TB (terabyte). This way both you and your wife can back up your hard drives and keep files that you don't use frequently. Costco has the external HD for around $110. I use my American Express card when I make electronic purchases as they provide one additional year of warranty for your electronic products.



Let us know what you decide.

 

[Greg Duggan]

I just picked up 2 WD 500gb external devices and backed up the home pc and my office laptop. I have way to many pics on both and felt it was time to back up these to pc's

What are your thoughts on going with a laptop vs a desk top pc. am i going to way over pay for the laptop?



I am going to give Dell a call and see what its going to cost both ways.



GregD

 

[Greg Meyer]

Here comes the heresy... It has been well over two years since we have suggested the purchase of any Dell systems or servers. A once fine product line has become a victim of bean counter engineering and very poor customer service.



We also have a serious problem with most home users spending above $550 for a laptop. In fact, we have rarely suggested more than "price shopping" for most home laptop systems unless there are compelling needs. (One recent is my own purchase of a HDMI equipped laptop to leave with the big screen for Netflix) For REAL "roadwarriors" I suggest Lenovo systems and they can get pricey but in a business setting their extra measure of reliability is a must. For almost everybody else, (that includes my wife, a teacher, my son, a lawyer, and my daughters, both social workers) I have been satisifed with $400-500 machines from eMachines, Asus, and Acer. Why? Because most people "overbuy" when getting a laptop. Investing more money for features and/or capacity that will never get used is not wise. You end up with a wonderfully remembered "hand-me-down" to kids in three or four years.



Finally, my personal opinion is that a laptop is a very poor choice for a computer unless you absolutely have to have only one system and need it to be mobile. There are adequate systems for home use (internet, word processing, non-serious games) out there complete with printers(for $75 more with a scanners and copier), and 19"flat screens for arouind $450. (Serious gamers whole other story...our hardware guy put together a system for Christmas that a $3,400.00 video board and a $1,500.00 processor... whole thing was over $7500.00 for a 14 yr old kid!) Then buy a $450 laptop for those few times you need mobility and be happy and productive both at home and on the road.



For businesses, look to spend around $800 for quality desktop systems plus the cost of your choice of display.



The advice about maximum memory is very good. Most people should get by with 160 GB hard drives. Put your video and music on an external drive to keep your system running quickly...sorting through 300-400 gigs of music to get to a folder of my documents leads to the "slows". External backups are also good advice. If you have several users at home, there are now NAS (Network Attached Storage) Devices that allow backups from multiple systems so the whole family can take advantage of them.



Lastly, comparison shop from Newegg.com and compusa.com for laptops and desktop systems. Many times our "wholesalers" are unable to beat their price to us.

Enough of my ranting...

 

[Jim B]

Greg,

Call me before you do anything....

 

[Bass Tracker]

Depending on how much you want me to type, I will atleast say this. Laptops are not good. They are slow. max the RAM all day and the machine will still be nothing compared to a desktop.



Memory is always the most important. Any processor below atlast 2.5Ghz is going to be noticably slow.



Hard Drive size. Usually 120GB is good for most people, but if you have LOTS of music and pictures. then spend the money and get a 500GB.



I'm not sure which brand you would want as I have been using custom builds for quite some time, I am not a Dell fan at all. But again I mostly game on my PC, so as far using it for your needs a Dell would probably work just fine, as would a HP.



and my biggest recommendation..GET WINDOWS XP PRO... Vista just sucks horribly and Windows 7 is to early in release to be any good... Windows XP is a Solid O/S with Sevice Pack 3 and your good to go..



feel free to ask me anything else you need to know.



-Jason

 

[Tim Koepp]

I am pretty impressed with the new Laptop "Satellite" from Toshiba. nice features, great price.



regarding xp/vista/7: I have all three, use them daily. Still prefer XP but truly wonder how much longer it will be supported by MS. I have had very few issues with 7, and those were my own expectation to find something in navigation where is resides in XP.

Vista is, and always will be, crap.

 

[Greg Meyer]

Regarding XP... Here is a quote from our internal info... Dated 4/9/2009



"As planned, Microsoft today retired Mainstream Support for Windows XP and Office 2003. However, for both products, Microsoft is not planning to retire Extended Support until April 8, 2014. If Redmond ends up releasing a fourth service pack for XP, it will retire support for SP3 (released April 2008) two years after SP4 is released, or in April 2014, whichever comes first. The same applies for Office 2003, which is also at SP3 (released in September 2007). In other words, most users don't have to worry for almost five more years."

 

[Tim Koepp]

good to know, thanks,

and I would not be without a Mybook for backup, ever. its the best insurance you can buy for $109 for a 1T on sale.

 

[Rich Stern]

Greg, I agree with the recommendation to focus on price shopping. Outside of the high dollars machines aimed at business users, dekstop and laptop PCs have become a commodity categeory.



Be sure to check out FatWallet.com and SlickDeals.net for deals.

 

[Jerry Carpenter2]

Just got a toshiba A505-S6965, love it. I did ban the kids from it. To many bad things kept happing to the home pc.

 

[Greg Duggan]

Thanks for all the input.



i am going to pass on the laptop idea and go with the desk top, i do have a 500gb external for my music and pics.

I am currenntly looking at a Dell Studio with 750gb hard drive with 6gb sdram. This modle comes with a 3yr warrenty and a 24 HD monitor. Total said and done is 700.00. Includes MS office, Macafee and an upgraded graphic card. what do you think?



GregD

 

[Bass Tracker]

Greg,



The BEST Anti-Virus I have seen is Symantec Endpoint. It does all 3 layers. (Network,active, and Anti-Virus/Spyware). It takes almost nothing from the system, I feel Mcafee is by far the most system intensive antivirus client and will slow all your programs down.



I see you said 6GB RAM, so I am assuming your going with either 64bit Vista or 32Bit Windows 7. If so let us know how Windows 7 works out. Good Luck

 

[Bill Hamilton]

Windows 7 has been running on both my desktops since before Christmas and I have NOT had any problems other than some OLD programs not being able to load. Make sure you back everything up to your external drive before you load W7.

 

[Jim B]

Jason, i will agree with you 100% on Mcafee but i disagree on symantec endpoint. First SEP is a enterprise level product that the average home user wont have access to. Home users get the "Norton" which is pretty much in the same line as Mcafee. There is absolutley overhead with SEP 11, its actually got quite a large footprint and its performance degradation is a common complaint on just about every IT forum i go to. My benchmarking tells me it gobbles up close to 20% more system resources then SAV 10 did and thats with the firewall turned off. Turn it on and the packet sniffing takes up even more. Then theres the good old Symantec memory leaks that cause the services to gobble up every bit of memory they can. I also can tell you how many peices of malware and trojan viruses i have watched SEP just let slip by and infect the system. And dont even try to load it on a SQL server if you want your users to be able to pull data in a reasonable timeframe. Thankfully i have convinced the powers at be here to buck corporate's influence and move to Trend and on all of my servers and the desktops we have loaded it on as a test pilot all of the issues related to AV have gone away....





Greg, call me......

 

[Greg Meyer]

WQithout repeating uit all... I agree with Jim. We have been avoiding Symantec and McAfee for years. Trend has begun to "expand" in resource needs and so has AVG, but both are preferable. For the home user the AVG Free version does well. Malwarebytes, Spybot round out a fairly effective security scheme for the home user. Add a decent NAT router behind your modem and you are good to go at home.

 

[Bass Tracker]

Your right about the End Point being easily accessible for enterprise level. We use it at my work and see even our oldest slowest laptops are not effected by it. But I used to use Trend-Micro and that was also a nice product, maybe more important is just stay away from Mcafee.

 

[Jim B]

We use it here too and since we upgraded to it "slowness" has been a common complaint the desktop guys get. It seems like any high I/O application has problems with it as well as any pc with less then 2gb of ram. All of ours have 2gb now but the ones that didnt needed an upgrade almost instantly. Out machines arent on the cutting edge but they are normal average 2 year old machines that any company would have and SEP can bring them to a hault. Monthly scheduled scans are always a fun time too since it pegs the disk I/O even when the scan is set to low priority....



I can not wait to get SEP off my network.

 

[Mad Kayaker]

Hey Greg - I haven't been on the site much but figured I'd add a little color on things that may not have been touched on but are important. Not sure what model you are looking at but make sure it is a dual core or quad core processor and it comes with Windows 7 vs Vista. Dell is good about giving you upgrade possibility and if you can afford to upgrade the processor by any level, I would think about that. In terms of internal memory, applications are starting to evolve and I think you will be on the cusp of performance in two or three years if you only go with 6GB of RAM. I think you'd be better off going with 8GB or higher even if you have applications that don't necessarily need that now and it is relatively small dollars for an additional 2mb. The other thing I would do is take a careful look at the graphics card and amount of memory with the card as this will have an impact on video performance.



Also, if you have your heart set on a desktop vs a laptop be careful about buying a slim pc or small form factor pc's, etc... They will not necessarily take additional cards you may eventually want to put into them.





I have purchased Dell computers over the past 12 years and really try to hold onto them for a long time so upgrading the stuff I mentioned, in the long run makes sense - I still tow with a 2001 Grand Cherokee v8 I bought new and probably won't buy another vehicle for another year or two. I would go with the xps line of studio desktops if you can afford it.



I recently purchased a Lenovo laptop through their employee discount plan (formally owned by IBM) as a xmas gift and it has surpassed the giftee's expectation. This was the first non-Dell machine I have bought and am glad it worked out. I use a lenovo thinkpad at work and love mine.





Finally, not to rock the trend here, but if you are really only going to use it for personal home use just for what you are saying you are going to use it for, I would consider one last time, purchasing a laptop. Personally, I like desktops for business and home use but I use a combination of desktops and laptops all the time and see benefits to both and glad I don't have to choose.



My brother and his wife, use it more in line with what you are going to use it for and love the portability of a laptop and wireless capability. They had a desktop pc but hated being tied to one place in their home when they wanted to use it.



Regardless, hope you get what you need and it works out. Looking forward to hooking up with you and JimB and anyone else in the MA/NH area at Lake Winnisquam in May!



Bill, the MadKayaker

 

[Greg Duggan]

Hey Bill nice to hear from you, lets make sure we get together this spring!

I havn't made my decision as of yet. I am going to do some shoping this weekend and look at all options avail before i buy.

I will take all of the input here and try to make a resonable yet affordable purchase.

Thanks again for all the input. This is not area of expertise so your input has been very helpfull.



GregD