Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler new computer

in market for a new custom computer....any other place to get one besides dell, gateway and alienware....it will used for storing movies, music, burning, digital pixs...looking for monitor and full tower.....

HP, or build your own. For the love of mike, don't buy Gateway. And the Alienwares, while nice, are awfully expensive.

cannot build my own....my brother gave it a try couple years ago and it has been a total disaster.......i have to take it to him every couple months for "fine tuning"..and now the half the fans are not working and the other half make too much noise...hence the need for a new one !!

I read somewhere that Dell bought Alienware.

Dell did buy alienware, but they are operating as different entities.

Alienware is profeting from Dell's buying power and cheap warehouse prices.


Anyways, how much are you looking to spend? I can hunt down some components or brands for what you need and what you want to spend. :-)

about 3k including the monitor (hopefully 20 in flat screen digital) and speakers

3 grand, man, what are you going to use it for? I just built a high end HTPC for under $800 bucks.

and how exactly do you do that ?? i thought "good computers" cost around that much...i plan to use it mostly for surfing, burning, some gaming, digital pixs etc...

5+ years ago retail desktops used to cost a lot more to purchase, that is why most people would build their own. Today, prices have come down a lot and you can buy a very very good system for $1000 or less. Heck good laptops don't even cost 3 grand these days.

Anyway, it is very easy to build a great system for under $800-1000 bucks as well. You just buy the parts from Newegg, Zipzoomfly, pcAlchemy, Directron, etc... and put it all togethor, no problem.

I don't know about great system for $1000... mine cost me $1500 without the monitor, which should run you about $400 or so. Then again, I did buy that $165 case...

The HTPC was not costly becasue we had several pieces of hardware for it. But the puter system we built for my main system about 15 months ago was close to $ 1,600 including 19" LCD Viewsonic and wireless keyboard mouse. Total price was with shipping and lowest prices at the time, and also spent extra on the case, wiring, and lighting of it, got carried away with it. lol

DIY:

(good to great pricing)

CPU - $200-500
Mobo - $100-200
RAM - $100-200
Video - $150-600
Hard Drive - $100-200
CD/DVD/R - $50
Case/PS - $50-?
XP Home/MCE - $100
Other Software - $?
Display (LCD) - $200-800

So the low end is about a grand for everything (low end = still a good PC) and the high end is whatever you can justify spending. Building your own PC is not too hard once you know what you are doing.

3K is a load for a computer nowadays. I like Dell, but that's because we use them here at work and have very few problems (I'm a sysadmin here). I have never been a fan of Gateway or HP. Alienware makes fine machines but they are geared for the gaming/fanboy/benchmark crowd and are more expensive than they need to be. I spec'd parts for a computer in the class you are talking about a couple of months ago and came it at $2K for a completely fully loaded machine with a Samsung 19" lcd monitor. I mean 250G HDD, 2GB low latency ram, whatever GeForce was new at the time, DL DVD burner, etc. A quick swipe at Dell.com shows you can get the same thing plus a warranty and 20" LCD and a dual tv tuner for about $2400 USD.

is it the XPS home and office gear ?? this was one of the considerations......

Yes it was an XPS in the Home/Home Office section. Solid computers. Dell (and I would guess all tier 1 manufacturers) spends about 6-7 months designing and integrating new platforms and they usually end up as rock-solid systems.

I personally build all of my own systems and I do occasionally suffer because of it. Things such as memory sticks that just will not work in a certain manufacturers motherboard. But the margins just keep getting tighter and tighter to the point where I don't really save a lot of money even when building a high-end machine. I certainly can't build a "granny" machine that's just used for internet, email, and word processing for $400 including an LCD like Dell, HP, and the like can. At least not with the parts I like to use.

Anyway, for $3K you should get a real performer with all the bells and whistles. You really could spend 2 bills and get a really good machine. Heck, if gaming with the newest titles like Doom3 etc. wasn't in the equation you could spend under 1K and be happy. Just depends what you want out of the system.

Having recently built a computer with Roger, and then another for a friend, I've found that if you're looking for an entry level system (which nowadays is really quite good, except for gaming) you can't do better than Dell pricewise. Once you start upgrading though, Dell starts getting pricey. More RAM? Ka-Ching! $$, nicer video card? KA-CHING! $$$ (And beside that, you only have about two or three choices of video cards to choose from!)

If you're looking for a really suped up computer (and with $3K, you certainly could) you really should look into getting a custom built system. www.monarchcomputer.com makes some good systems and doesn't charge an arm and a leg.

thanks for the link.....never heard about the monarch computers.....i will try and see what i can come up with

I'm just adding a recommendation to stay away from computers like Dell.

As a technical person at a school, lots of problems come my way from many people. Software problems are an easy fix, but Dell by far has had the most hardware problems. Just had to replace a dead power supply on a 1 year old computer yesterday, and had to tell someone their Dell laptop's hard drive died (many, many have) and they need to get a new one, etc.

In reply to:

---

I'm just adding a recommendation to stay away from computers like Dell.

---

Dan;
I always thought that Dell was about the best? What brands do you recommend, then?

Dell is about getting supplier prices as low as possible. Doesn't necessarily mean that they make shoddy computers, our PowerEdge 2600s seem pretty damn solid, but I wouldn't class them as the best. Biggest, perhaps...

My last two computers (over the last three years) have both been HP. I got them at Costco for about 600 – 800 ea minus monitor. I just go in and pick up the second to the best one they have, which is generally faster than what I need. Once you uninstall all that HP crap, they run pretty good.

One draw back of building your own that no one has mentioned here, and what costs you…..is the software. If you build it, you need to buy your OS and whatever software you don’t already have or can’t transfer. Don’t know about you guys, but the only time I upgrade MS Office is when I buy a new PC.

I've had far better experiences with Dell than HP or IBM (Lenovo now). As far as getting the cheapest parts supply, well all of them do that. But I understand. Especially since all of the computers I build use very high quality power supplies. What I like beyond what might be called my own good luck with their systems over the years (and this makes it easy on IT types) is that you can give Dell a jingle and a new part will be sitting on your desk at 10 the next day with a paid return shipping sticker for the bad part. Of all the Dell machines I've administered the only problems that have occured on an even remotely ongoing basis is hard drive failures. Now, since Dell buys and sell ba-Jillions of hard drives from various manufacturers, and being that HDD's by their nature are one the most likely components to fail (anything with moving parts) this is not suprising. Intel was an IBM shop at the time (don't know now, our group started buying Dell's outside of the normal channels) and I can't tell you how many HDD's I replaced there. Of course IBM machines used IBM drives. Can't say I'm a huge fan of their laptops though. A little fragile (not nearly as bad as a Vaio, don't even get me started on those pansy-ass pieces of cow dung) The ThinkPad's I've run across have been ugly as hell but nearly bulletproof. As far as souping the system up, buy a Dell barebones and add your own RAM. Just don't tell tech support if you have to call them. Also,remember my fellow geeks, just because all of the forum members are using computers doesn't mean they are comfortable being up to their elbows in the innards of a computer.

Well good for you! In my case Dell has a horrendous customer service with the school district I work for (and I live in Austin so you would think Dell would do well at home right??). We just replaced about 150 computers since september and a good 20 of those already have hard drive problems. The issue? it took Dell 2 months to come and service them!! (I supposedly can't touch them if they're under warranty).
Anyway in my opinion, as well as their machines might be built their customer service is getting worse everyday.

That reminds me of the last batch of HPs we got sometime in 2000. Out of about 150, 20 or so had HD failures within a year. This was due to a widespread problem with IBM Deskstar drives, though, so we couldn't exactly blame HP. They were quick to ship out replacement drives, and even honored our request to NOT replace with IBM drives.

We've been happy with Maxtor.

Funny, funny, funny you should say that about HP!

No, No, No, NOT so funny!!!

The HP that we bought around 2000/1 had the HD do a major and irreversable dump here about a week ago.Did the screech and scrunch bit and......

Except that we're using Seagates.

I've used 3 Dell computers while in the employ of the feds and each one died promptly after the 3 year warranty ended.
Trying to replace simple parts like a cdrom was never possible b/c of the proprietary formats (specialized case, hole locations, etc.)
The only thing i might buy from Dell now is a cheap flatscreen monitor and even that i doubt.

More HP hard drive stories. My programmer used to work for a cancer software company here. All the bigwigs got new HP laptops, and one with a French keyboard was inadvertantly sent along with all the English keyboards, none of the suits wanted it, they didn't return it, so it became his.

Had it over here one day to do some LAN gaming and was looking at the extended functions on the function keys. We were trying to figure out what the glyph of the stack of pancakes over F12 meant. Hmm... BLUE FUNCTION-F12... oh, parks the drive heads, coolie... now... unpark... no, really, unpark... uh, shazaam. No dice. The heads are probably still parked on that sucker in a landfill.

Few days ago three of us were discussing hard drive manufacturers, about 12 years each of PC use (that's PC-compatible, not Personal Computer, we all came from Motorola/Mac or Sun/SPARC and CBM before that) netted us about 13 Western Digital drives that we can remember (I account for 6 of them - I still have the model and serial numbers written down for them). Of those 13, only 5 were retired before malfunctioning. Only one of us has ever killed a non-WD drive, bro packed in a Samsung IDE in his Frankenmac blue & white G3.

Longest runtime depends on your definition - I'm a daily user of two Quantum Fireball 20GB that I've taken with me to all my primary work systems since I broke the 1GHz barrier, about 6 years ago. One of the other guys has a pair of IBM Deathst... er, Darkstars that are older, but are in a secondary computer.

Bren R.

Skyhawk,

Very strange. I'm not sure what kind of warranty you have on those, but ours are next business day on-site for clients and 4-hour on-site for servers. They offer on-site for any repair but for most things we just have them send the part and replace it ourselves. This of course does not void the warranty. I just don't know what to say but my experience has been completely opposite of yours. I can't even imagine the hailstorm of sh!t my boss would bring down on our Dell rep if something like that happened. Damn HDDs. Can't wait until the NAND based ones are cheap and available. Oh well. There's a reason it is policy here that each employee is responsible for their data, and given a large backed up network share to store their critical stuff. If their HDD barfs and they haven't copied their work to the network drive in a week, well, they are deep doodoo.

Well that's why it sucks to work for a school district!! I want to replace the hard drive myself but they usually don't let me. I keep complaining everyday until somebody shows up and then eventually the Dell guy shows up or they send me a hard drive.

To be honest I think the main problem isn't Dell but the district IT department. What I don't like about Dell is the contractors that they have in the Austin area, they suck. I usually can do a better job than they can and faster but I'm tied by the policies the district has... Are there any job openings in your company?

Peter,
The irony is around that time Maxtor made the drives for IBM. Thats probably why they were so quick to honor your request because Maxtor was the same drive only cheaper.lol

What about the iMac? ~$1500 and more than enough computer than what you will use it for.

If you are big into gaming it might not be your cup of tea but I prefer Mac to PC. Not that I'm a hardcore windows hater but I just get less trouble from my Mac.

Cheers,

Jordan

Like I said, they're not Maxtors... They're Seagates. I'm working for the same company as Peter now.

They certainly didn't look the same. Different case, diffenent logic board. Oh well.

Err, I feel dumb. He's talking about the old computers, isn't he....

I'm talking about the prior generation of HPs. They were Vectras. The d530s have been great. Only a few HD replacements here and there so far.

/knocks on (fake) wood.

Ya our company resells HPs. Ever since the HP/Compaq merger their business class desktops and servers went from average to really good.

I would stay away from a HP/Compaq retail PC however.

thanks for the discussion and views......sorry i was not able to post for the past two days....the debate continues.....apple vs wintel, pantium vs amd, xp vs linux, gaming vs home office.....i am more comfortable using windows platform, never used AMD chip and will be using computer for digital stuff - cds, dvds, pixs etc and some gaming....i did try monarch computers and their prices look reasonalbe.....agree with dell computers being solidly built...

Skyhawk,

Oh, the joys of "big IT." I started out as a drone in the Intel Enterprise IT department. Talk about "filling out forms in triplicate" before anything gets done. But with 200,000 machines plus worldwide you need some strict controls. Luckily I was quickly able to move to supporting a single R&D group that was allowed to buy everything outside of normal procurement. This was because the group needed support for multiple platforms not to mention some odd skills. For example: I ran a broadband cable internet service and an ATSC (HDTV) broadcasting station from my lab. No kidding. This was late '98 and our group was riding the bleeding edge of content delivery. So the dept. manager one day said "Mark and Ajit, we need to be able to test this stuff once we get some solid builds going. I want to test delivery via cable modem and the ATSC broadcast stream. Set it up." About $300,000 and many a sleepless night later we had it all running. We had a broadcast radius of about 35 feet, but that was good enough. The cable thing was cool too, I purchased a Cisco CMTS and about 20 different cable modems and put them in the developers cubicles. Quite the cool bit of tech back in the day.

has anybody purchased from Falcon Northwest ?? seems like they make some pretty neat stuff......

I've seen them advertised everywhere... they were the offical computer of EverQuest at one point, for what thats worth.