New or Upgrade?
 

I need to either replace or upgrade my 5 year old desktop computer.
I'm still running Windows 98 and I have P3 500 chip-but it's deadly slow and a real pain-in-the-butt.

I'd like a machine with a P4 2.0, bigger hard drive, and more memory.
I do photoshop and dreamweaver work plus a lot of word documents. I don't do any gaming or video watching or editing.

My power supply is new and my floppy and CD drive are good
I have a copy of XP on disk from my laptop.

What's a better move....buying a new motherboard, sound card, hard drive and memory, or buying a whole new machine? I have a big external hd and cd burner already.

Thanks in advance, you S-B Geeks!

joe@surfcasting-rhodeisland.com

here's the consideration I have if I was in your shoes.

If money isn't an issue then get a new pc.

If you can use having a 2nd pc in the house then that just adds to the reasoning.

The draw back from getting the new pc is that you would have to transfer files from your old pc to the new one. Very easily done but just a pain.


pros about rebuild. Waste makes haste....

Save a couple of bucks by rebuilding and reusing your old parts.

Cons: if getting new mother board you'll have to wipe out the old hard drive and reinstall. Backing up your data prior to wiping out harddrive maybe a bit cumbersome. Suggestion would be to burn the data on cd unless you have another computer to temporarily transfer the data to.

any questions, feel free to email me.

No reason to upgrade your exisint machine. If you did a :

M-board: $75
2GHZ class CPU & FAN $130
Memory 256MB $50-80
Video Card - $50
New Case & Powersupply- $55 (Your old PS likely will not work)
Good drive - $100

You are now at $450-500 and when you install WindowsXP and after 30 days it tells you to register or it shuts off you now have to go buy a new version of confess to the diabolical Bill Gates that your using one liscense for 2 boxes. Then needing to buy a ful WinXP for $150

OR

For $600 you can buy a new Dell, and for $700 get a new Dell and monitor and have 2 stations at the house....

Unless you like to upgrade piecemeat over time and like being a geek it is just not cost effective to upgrade and build yourself...

I could probably put together a AMD XP1700 for less

prices not always what they seem to be...
 

I purchase dell pc's for my company quite often.

Depending on the sales promotion their currently running you can get a decent pc for relatively a cheap price.

The only problem is that when I often change or upgrade certain components the prices jump dramatically. More then usual I often spend about $1200 for a pc rather then the $700 price they advertise. Its the little stuff that you want that brings up the price.

i find that the integrated mother boards aren't as good...perfer non intergrated mother boards as if the integrated video controller goes you'll have to replace the entire mb.

just a thought.

But that's what the warranty is for (still a PIA though). I had a bunch of Dell PCs & Workstations and they are decent for the money and as long as it did not have a deathstar drive....

As for integrated, they're adequate if you are not doing anything intensive. Some of the boards based on the Nforce chips aren't bad (I'm running this on a A7NXE Deluxe - not bad but not dedi-gaming)...

Sure it's nice to run a tweaked out system if you have the need but a 2.2 with integrated sound/video/ with the OS and some apps for 6 and change is pretty stinkin' good too. Whoda thunk 6 years ago when we were spending 3K on P166s with 1GB drives, 8 MB video and 64 megs of memory that we'd be talking multi Ghz machines with 50Gb drives, 128MB graphics and half a gig of memory for under 1K. I remember paying close to 10K for a dual P6pro 200, 2.5GB SCSI , 21" monitor, 128MB ram and a 24 meg Elsa Gloria... The video card alone was $2500...

Thanks S-B geeks, what a country!

Re: prices not always what they seem to be...
 

I agree with what he just said.. integrated motherboards are a PITA.. they're nice if you're building a basic workstation, but if you want a good machine at home for GFX, games, what-not, avoid integrated.

That's how big corporate sellers like Dell, Compaq, and others do, they integrate as much as they can onto the motherboard... that is, sound, video, and etc. Cheap...

What you pay for is what you get.

i got a dell. so thats a bad thing, dan? there is a setback, i cant do my graphic design hwk or project on the dell. and also, im seem to be having a hard time to play a movie on the dell.

curious.....
 

I've had issues with playing DVDR movies on dell laptops but not with the desktops.

My company formerly use recorded DVD videos to show sales presentation of our product. When I came to the company I suggested to convert the files to mpeg so it saved us money and no longer have any issues when playing the video. Image quality isn't as crisp but its better then not being able to play the video at all.

What type of software are you using for your graphic design work?

Ken

Look at the back of your PC.. you can tell if you have integrated video or not by looking and see where the monitor is connected. If it looks like it's coming off the motherboard, it's integrated and that means CRAP!!!...

When you have integrated VIDEO, AUDIO, that means it's going to be using some of your CPU power to run these things, and that means you may not always have good performance, especially if running heavy-duty games/apps like movies, major games like warcraft/starcraft :)

However, not all is lost.. most motherboards do provide you with the ability to turn off the onboard video, allowing you to go purchase a good videocard as an add-on... for this to be done, you may need to consult your manual or your tech support.

Good luck, amigo. And BTW, what kind of Dell model do you have? What are its specs? If it's fairly brand new, you should be able to at least do your homework. However, for graphics design, you may definitely want to consider investing in a good videocard.

Re: curious.....
 

Most laptops are fairly robust.. they should be capable of running movies for your company. Games, however, can be another story into itself. It all depends.

If you liked MPEG, try DiVX or XViD, the latter which is pretty good, provides much better compression and quality.

I've used mplayer/mencoder on the FreeBSD/Linux platform, and I tell you, it totally RULES at compression...

It's really simple, if you are doing any serious gaming or digital editing you need a serious rig. If your gaming ends at SOL.EXE and the most you do is surf the web and mangle a couple photos and machine with integrated video and sound is an acceptable trade off for cost of a new machine.

If I was still in heavy gaming (they no longer make great flight sims :( ) I'd have set my machine up that way but I stuck with the Nforce chipset for now... Just hard to me to justify a $120 board with a $300 graphics card or even a $150 card when people are not gaming or doing heavy CAD / Photoshop...


Notaro - what did you get - Dell Specs??? And what are you trying to run?

just playing around
 

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Most laptops are fairly robust.. they should be capable of running movies for your company. Games, however, can be another story into itself. It all depends.

If you liked MPEG, try DiVX or XViD, the latter which is pretty good, provides much better compression and quality.
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Jugstah,

Prior to me coming to the company they tried several laptops and compared them (sony vaio, compaq, IBM and dell). They found that the dells ran the best for the money so they only purchased the dells.

I just started playing around with video editing and don't know too much about it. Just got a copy of Adobe Premiere for windows but I have used iMovie and Final Cut Pro on Macs.

I heard of DiVX and XViD but know nothing about it. Know of any good sites with literature on it?

How do you do the quote thing on this site?

Re: just playing around
 

Use the quote button on the bottom right of the individual post you want to quote....

The Dell Laptops were OK but I hope they were not the best out there as I was never truly impressed with them. I even thought the Sony's must be better...

Re: just playing around
 

Use WWW.GOOGLE.COM and type in DiVX and XViD and see where it takes you.. there are a LOT of sites available with information on this... surfing a few of them will eventually lead you to what you're looking for.

http://www.digital-digest.com/index.html would probably be a good start... for most people too.

And to do the quote thing, look at the bottom of the poster's post, you'll see a button "QUOTE" click on that.

cool...
 

thanks for the tips....tight lines and smooth pcs