Buying a new desktop PC

[JD45]

Unless someone changes my mind, I'm going to pick-up a new $700 Dell desktop from Best Buy tomorrow. They say Vista won't work with any old software.

Since I'm not a computer person, my needs are simple. It must have a DVD burner so I can finally put some match videos on disk. We have to use dial-up out in the country, so I hope Vista has no issues with that.

I also hope I don't have to trash a 1.5yr old Canon compact digital camera because of Vista.

Would I be better off buying a used tower w/DVD burner ,that will work with everything I own, to fix my old computer(I found one for $160)?

[Coolduckboy]

Build it yourself, I will NEVER buy from dell, hp, compaq, or anyone else unless it is a laptop. built my computer i have now with $1300 and it would cost just over $2000 with dell.

I would also, just upgrade your old computer and save the old parts.

[Bill M]

I just got a new computer 2 months ago and it had vista. All my programs save one worked on vista just fine. It just takes a ton of memory to operate.

[Thomas Moore]

Buy a MAC if all you're doing is movies and photos, MAC is the king.

[XRe]

Macs are expensive, but damn, they work - if you don't have a specific need for Windows, Mac OS is a super duper platform. If you already have a monitor and such, you can do a Mac mini w/ 2GB of RAM and a modem for right at $700, as well. Just FWIW If you spent a bit more, you could get into an iMac (with built in monitor).

Many of the "just need a PC" level Dell machines are actually attractively priced - a machine in the $700 range that includes a monitor is going to be hard to beat on a self-build, especially if you don't have any experience in building, or if you don't want to spend the time researching what the best options would be at this point (this stuff changes frequently). Realize that you might be able to load XP on it, too, and not have to deal w/ Vista, if you don't want to. Before I went Mac, I built a "sweet spot" PC for around $1500 - the equivalent Dell machine was in the $2500 neighborhood at the time. So, building can definitely save some cash, if you're shooting for performance on a budget - I just question trying to beat the price on lower end "just need a PC" type machines...

[bbbean]

Nothing says you have to use Vista. Most of the tech nerds I know or work with still stick with XP. It works.

[wgnoyes]

Unless someone changes my mind, I'm going to pick-up a new $700 Dell desktop from Best Buy tomorrow. They say Vista won't work with any old software.

Since I'm not a computer person, my needs are simple. It must have a DVD burner so I can finally put some match videos on disk. We have to use dial-up out in the country, so I hope Vista has no issues with that.

I also hope I don't have to trash a 1.5yr old Canon compact digital camera because of Vista.

Would I be better off buying a used tower w/DVD burner ,that will work with everything I own, to fix my old computer(I found one for $160)?

Dell OptiPlex from the Small and Medium Business division of Dell. (Just call yourself "myname.com" to become a business in their eyes.) Look at the OptiPlex 360. These machines are built with better components than the consumer grade boxes, and you can order it with XP.

http://www.dell.com/content/products/categ...;l=en&s=bsd

Edited December 3, 2008 by wgnoyes

[raz-0]

Currently, most desktops from manufacturers are of dubious quality unless you spend lots of money.

I would not consider dell at the moment, even their "commercial" products. They have been cheaping out on power supply capacitors and being jerks about it when they fail. For certain products, we are talking a greater than 80% failure rate over 3 years.

Completley unaccceptable. Their laptops are still tolerable as far as quality goes. To avoid it with desktops, you pretty much have to buy their higher end systems anyway (the XPS line isn't too bad).

HP is a bit better at the moment in terms of desktops, and they also produce decent laptops.

As for vista and old stuff, I wouldn't worry about much other than printers. The cheapy loss-leader printers that are deisgned to get you buying ink by the gallon are not deemed worth of much support and drvier updates. Consider them what the manufacturer does, a disposable promotional item. If it doesn't work at first, vista has several compatibility mode options, and the run as administrator option. One of them will usually get a program working. Most common worst case scenario is trying to install old software, and the installer freaks out because the installer was written poorly and freaks out about not understanding the version of windows you are trying to install it on, and thus exits with an error.

You can actually build a pretty bad-ass PC for under $1k doing it yourself. As far as a total budget build, breaking the $400 mark is pretty hard to do without dropping below a certain line of quality and perfomance that's not particularly attractive and increases the odds of you eating it on vendors not standing behind their products. (brand name RAM is about the only thing you would have no issue with warranties being honored provided you can run a meaningful test).

[Coolduckboy]

Currently, most desktops from manufacturers are of dubious quality unless you spend lots of money.

I would not consider dell at the moment, even their "commercial" products. They have been cheaping out on power supply capacitors and being jerks about it when they fail. For certain products, we are talking a greater than 80% failure rate over 3 years.

Completley unaccceptable. Their laptops are still tolerable as far as quality goes. To avoid it with desktops, you pretty much have to buy their higher end systems anyway (the XPS line isn't too bad).

HP is a bit better at the moment in terms of desktops, and they also produce decent laptops.

As for vista and old stuff, I wouldn't worry about much other than printers. The cheapy loss-leader printers that are deisgned to get you buying ink by the gallon are not deemed worth of much support and drvier updates. Consider them what the manufacturer does, a disposable promotional item. If it doesn't work at first, vista has several compatibility mode options, and the run as administrator option. One of them will usually get a program working. Most common worst case scenario is trying to install old software, and the installer freaks out because the installer was written poorly and freaks out about not understanding the version of windows you are trying to install it on, and thus exits with an error.

You can actually build a pretty bad-ass PC for under $1k doing it yourself. As far as a total budget build, breaking the $400 mark is pretty hard to do without dropping below a certain line of quality and perfomance that's not particularly attractive and increases the odds of you eating it on vendors not standing behind their products. (brand name RAM is about the only thing you would have no issue with warranties being honored provided you can run a meaningful test).

I can probably build (just the tower) one for around $600 that will last for 2-4 years.

[davidwiz]

I agree with what others said, get a Apple Mac. Yes, they are slightly more expensive then a similarly equipped PC, but you don't have to deal with all of the PC melodrama.

If you are really set on getting Vista, then you need to get at the bear minimum, Vista Home Premium or Vista Business. Don't let anyone talk you into getting Vista Starter or Vista Home Basic - these are stripped down, bear bones operating systems. As for the hardware, at the bear minimum, you'll need a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, a graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0 with WDDM 1.0 driver support, and 512MB graphics RAM.

I'm posting this on a 2008 Apple iMac 20" that we got for $1,200 (it is actually the 2.66GHz version w/ a 500GB hard drive that was a display model and retails for $1,550).

[Flatland Shooter]

I stick with business grade machines and Windows XP Pro. Some of my software will not work with Vista or Mac. Of those that won't work with Vista, only one has an upgrade available and its over $3 grand.

Take a look at CompUSA.com in their business section. Decent prices and better than average components.

[Tom S.]

Whether your old software will work with Vista depends on how old the software is and which version (32 bit or 64 bit) of Vista you have. The 32 bit version has better compatibility with older software than the 64 bit does. The only old software I have that won't run with Vista is a very old National Geographic Magazine collection. However, most of my software isn't that old.

I am one of the original Vista haters, but even I have to admit that since MS released the service pack for it, it has gotten much much better. One thing Vista offers over XP is better security.

[JD45]

Thanks for the tips. I bought the Dell this morning, and I must say I hate what has happened to society. Store clerks used to treat people with respect even if you were only buying batteries. When you are spending close to a grand in any store you would think they might at least pretend they want to help. No grown man wants to ask questions to some fat, gay, dufus when buying a computer. They should be trying to sell the thing! Maybe this is the reason the economy sucks. Anyone ever here of a salesman?

I going plug it in tonight,and hope I never have to talk to anyone

in that store again.

[shred]

FWIW, Vista comes with built-in DVD burning software, so that's a plus. Much of the major suckness got fixed with SP1.

If you really really want to downgrade to XP, drop me a PM, but you'll have to re-acquire whatever software came with it.

[JD45]

I actually got my dial-up connection to work with their instructions for Vista. I'm on the new computer right now. Vista is rejecting my camera software and Photoshop Elements, but I think Canon has an on-line fix for that.

If I only could get cable or DSL out here. The processor speed on this thing smokes the old computers I'm used to using.

[Rob D]

I upgraded to vista last year and wish I could go back to xp. The first thing I did after installing it was to change all the visual effects settings to make it look and run just like XP. Once you do that, the memory issues are pretty much gone. Then all you have left to deal with is a mountain of compatability issues. When I switched to vista, I had to swap out my sound card, TV tuner card, and mp3 player because none of them would run with vista.

+1 to building the PC yourself. Newegg.com if you're going windows based. Macs are great if you want to spend the money and aren't interested in computer games.

[AZ38super]

The problem is you upgraded to Vista. Then you end up with hardware and driver issues.

I have an HP system designed for Vista from the start and it has had no problems at all since day one.

I even have software running they said would not work on Vista.

[speculatorking]

I have a dell and am not very happy with it. Only a year and a half old and already had the mother board replaced twice and my RAID hard drive just went out. If you ever have to call customer service

good luck. You will be connected to India, the Phillipines or some other God-forsaken place. Good luck.

Edited December 6, 2008 by speculatorking

[wgnoyes]

Well, different experiences with Dell, I guess. My desktop Dimension XPS is 4 months shy of 4 years old and it's running fine. My Inspiron E1505 primary laptop is going on 3 years and it's running fine. My previous laptop is an Inspiron 8000 bought early in 2001 and it still runs well and with the same batteries. I have a 4 year old PowerEdge 1600SC server with 6 hotswap scsi drives plus 3 extra that someone recently just GAVE me when his office gave it and a rack server to him, and it's running fine, though it is being horribly underutilized.

At the office, there are 2 desktops, both at least 4 years old and they're running well. A third one ran for 10 years and was still working when it was replaced. We have a fleet of some 30 laptops being bounced around day to day and beaten on by elementary school kids and they're all working. We had one Latitude D531's hard drive go out under warranty and one call to Dell had a replacement drive at our door the very next day.

So for me when buying or recommending, I have a very short list.

1. Dell
   
2. Build your own only if you're a geek in which case you really don't need anyone's help (never done that myself)
   
3. All the others
   

Oh, and only 5 of the above systems are running Vista, and I left those in place because I figured I couldn't hold out forever.

Edited December 8, 2008 by wgnoyes

[wgnoyes]

Unless someone changes my mind, I'm going to pick-up a new $700 Dell desktop from Best Buy tomorrow. They say Vista won't work with any old software.

Well, that's Best Buy and they have to hedge their bets with consumer-level users that don't even know or care where windows lives on the hard drive, much less screw with it. An awful lot of old stuff doesn't run under vista because microsoft tried to <sarcastic quote> "help" </sarcastic quote> by adding a whole lot of extraneous security stuff. Games are particularly bad about operating system sensitivity. We had to adjust ezwinscore somewhat to install and run on vista before sending out version 3. On the other hand (and this surprised me), Office XP (2 versions backleveled from the current Office 2007) runs fine on vista home basic.

[JD45]

Ok, now I'm really starting to get frustrated with Vista. The test DVD-RW that I burned will not play on a near new home DVD player hooked to the T.V.(it is supposed to play nearly all DVDs), but will play on the computer. I thought that a DVD-RW would play about anywhere and could be erased and burned again.

Since none of my Canon software works with Vista I had to go around the world for hours trying to trick it into saving video from my SD card in the card reader(it won't accept anything from a USB cable hooked to the camera). Somehow I sort of accidently loaded a few videos and got them into Movie Maker. The next day I couldn't figure out how I did it. Vista changes stuff around, like a file will appear or disappear in certain players.

The only thing that hasn't been impossible is ripping songs from a CD.

I also created a second user's desktop, and when you go there the screen goes blank for a long time like it's a slow 20 year-old computer( I thought the thing was about to crash). And there is hardly anything on the 600GB harddrive.

[wgnoyes]

I never had much luck burning video DVD's either, and I'm running XP. The TV player has to specifically say it will play DVD-RW, as opposed to DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, etc, and I suspect that's your problem, so I'm not sure you can lay that at the feet of Vista, though I'm sure it's tempting. If you're using DVD-RW, try using a burn-once DVD-R and see if your deck will play that.

For your Canon camera, have you been to Canon's website to see if there are updated drivers or software available for your particular model?

When you say you created a second user's desktop, do you mean you created a 2nd userid on your computer? If so, the first time you logon to that userid, it is going to be very slow because it's setting up all of the desktop items, folders, settings, and whatnot for that new userid, and that takes time. Subsequent logon's should be much quicker. That happens with XP, as well.

Edited December 8, 2008 by wgnoyes

[A-shot]

I had a hook up for a little while but I was building dual core XP towers for just under $300. XP will be great until windows seven or whatever else is coming. Vista seems like a transitional OS, the next one will be THE one.

[p99shooter]

DVD-R is the best media type as far as compatibility with "normal" DVD players. Check out DigitalFaq.com for a thorough media guide (not sure how old this is though).

There's also the possiblity that it burned the DVD in Windows Media format, which is normally not compatible with DVD players. I would look to non-Microsoft software, such as Nero, to author and burn DVDs.

[mjohns930]

Agreed with p99. You need to make sure that the files on the DVD have been burned in the correct format. Use Nero to convert it to the correct format.

Also I have built my own machines, and if you are not one to want to mess with it, buy something from Best Buy. But my recommendation is to get something from Gateway. They have US based customer support. I have dealt with them recently and they were very helpful, and you could understand them.

Vista is a lot better than it was. I was die hard XP up until about 4 or 5 months ago. Vista has given me zero problems after I got it set up to my liking. I also use 64 bit and I have no compatibility problems.