I need a new computer

[blash]

There is a big counter to this. Well several actually, but the biggest is lifespan. Even new, many PC's, ESPECIALLY those cheaper than a comparable Mac, struggle with Vista. They certainly don't run it well at the budget end. Mac's on the other hand will run Mac OSX very very smoothly.

That's only true if:

1) You don't build your own machine, and allow yourself to get better parts for your money.

2) You don't maintain your Windows machine.

Even if I used OS X, I would still want to do a mandatory reformat every few months to clean out the crap applications that I had installed but didn't use. I need to make sure that my hard drive is properly defragmented. I need to make sure to clean up stuff I don't use when the hard drive starts to fill up.

If you don't do elementary maintenance for ANY system you use, you will notice it. I can go back to a Pentium 2 with 128 MB RAM (or even less) and load it up with a fresh copy of Windows XP and it will run perfectly quickly... until it starts to be clogged up with stuff it can't handle. Same thing with modern machines of any kind, just on a larger scale, and Windows makes it a little more obvious. This can actually help the user by forcing the user to do their maintenance rather than just letting their machine get more and more bloated.

 

[blash]

Just wondering how you can chop the upgrade fee in half that mrogers mentioned without knowing what part he was refering to. i.e. Size and type of the harddisk, Size of the monitor, CPU/MB or display card type.

Would you mind sharing your secret? Do you have a special channel that you can get part really cheap?

And what's wrong with a $500 machine? I have machines that cost less than that ... and seems running fine. Well, I do not play games .. maybe that explains it.

Well I know for the hard drive at least, 1 TB hard drives (i.e. 1,000 GB) are $100. Nobody with a budget needs that much space. If the poster is OK with running a $500 PC, then he/she is more than likely OK running it without a dedicated graphics card (since when were $500 PC's sold with dedicated graphics?), so they don't need to spend $100 on a graphics card, more like $30, and that's only if the motherboard they're using doesn't come with integrated graphics in the first place.

Look at Newegg.com

 

[mrodgers]

FWIW, I was guestimating.

Why buy a 500Gb drive for $79 when you can double it for $100. I was thinking a 1Tb drive.

I don't know anything about current processors and motherboards. All the quad core and duo stuff, I just haven't kept up with it. Newegg's "today's featured deal", motherboard and processor combo, $218.

I see RAM on Newegg for $55, $69, $61.... Double my memory for $50-100 (the $100 is a little off.)

LCD display to upgrade and replace my CRT on Newegg, I see $270, $219, $159, $129, $119. I gave it $130 in my post.

Am I so far off? What's wrong with a $500 computer? I spent $500 on an Athalon64 3500+, 200Gb drive, 2Gb ram, and yes, onboard graphics. Forgot about that, I had purchased an additional graphics card for $50. So I spent $500 while people at work were spending thousands just to get an Athalon64 3800+ and a bit better graphics card, not a thousand $$$ better, but better. I saved myself $1000 over them and had a computer that was only slightly not as fast. Worked quite well for me. At the time, I did game quite a bit (sim racing and flight simming.) For what I gamed with, I was getting 80 FPS, which is plenty more than enough while they all bragged about their 150 FPS. Of course, theirs performed no differently than mine did, only gave them the bragging rights of "I get 150 FPS!"

And today, I still use that same system with several TIFF files opened in Photoshop, Lightroom open, while browsing about 5-10 tabs in Firefox and doing my image presorting with Thumbsplus, windows explorer, and a batch file renamer open.

 

[Katier]

That's only true if:

1) You don't build your own machine, and allow yourself to get better parts for your money.

2) You don't maintain your Windows machine.

Even if I used OS X, I would still want to do a mandatory reformat every few months to clean out the crap applications that I had installed but didn't use. I need to make sure that my hard drive is properly defragmented. I need to make sure to clean up stuff I don't use when the hard drive starts to fill up.

If you don't do elementary maintenance for ANY system you use, you will notice it. I can go back to a Pentium 2 with 128 MB RAM (or even less) and load it up with a fresh copy of Windows XP and it will run perfectly quickly... until it starts to be clogged up with stuff it can't handle. Same thing with modern machines of any kind, just on a larger scale, and Windows makes it a little more obvious. This can actually help the user by forcing the user to do their maintenance rather than just letting their machine get more and more bloated.

OSX doesn't suffer in the same way as windows from clogging up of items like inventories. It's a *nix OS so manages such things MUCH better. It's definatly NOT a requirement (as a maintenance task) to re-install in the same way as windows. Defragmenting also isn't so much of an issue (not even sure there's a defragger built into OSX ) as again the file system is much better than Windows.

As for building your own machine, that does close the gap somewhat, especially as often people who do that constantly upgrade ( even when not strictly needed ) and would certainly buy the equivelent of 2-3 PC in say a 6 year lifespan of a Mac costing AT LEAST as much as the Mac.

 

[Village Idiot]

imacs....bleh.

I'm not a fan of AIOs though. I'm running a 15" unibody MBP and just purchased a 30" monitor for it.

Don't let anyone fool you, Apples are not bullet proof superhero machines. I just had to reinstall OS X this weekend because of the OS crashing on me. Thankfully I didn't lose anything. I'm also running Vista on the same machine. I'm using HP, Apple, Dell, Linux, OS X, XP, Vista, and Windows Home Server at home, so I'm not as biased as some people may be. I like the MBP for it's interface and OS X, but truthfully, that's the only reason to purchase one, well that and maybe the form factor.

Photo Shop should run just as good on Windows or OS X.

Edit: And for those saying that Apple's over priced. Compare a few similar products. I agree that you can get a Dell tower without monitor for cheaper than an imac when comparing just ram, HDD, and processor, but if you look on new egg, there's 22" AOI computer with 2.0 processors going for over $1500. That's the price of the base model 24" imac, correct?

 

[blash]

OSX doesn't suffer in the same way as windows from clogging up of items like inventories. It's a *nix OS so manages such things MUCH better. It's definatly NOT a requirement (as a maintenance task) to re-install in the same way as windows. Defragmenting also isn't so much of an issue (not even sure there's a defragger built into OSX ) as again the file system is much better than Windows.

Well, you'd be surprised. I know my family's 1st gen Intel iMac (Core Duo processor) doesn't run nearly as well as it did when we first got it and they don't install new things on it. The point about reformatting isn't about cleaning up internal stuff that's transparent to the user but rather cleaning out the stuff that's gathering cobwebs in the Applications folder and elsewhere.

HFS+ really isn't that much better than NTFS if you actually do your research. Now, if Apple had decided to bundle in ZFS then you'd have a point, or maybe even ext4.

 

[bhop]

Well, you'd be surprised. I know my family's 1st gen Intel iMac (Core Duo processor) doesn't run nearly as well as it did when we first got it and they don't install new things on it. The point about reformatting isn't about cleaning up internal stuff that's transparent to the user but rather cleaning out the stuff that's gathering cobwebs in the Applications folder and elsewhere.

HFS+ really isn't that much better than NTFS if you actually do your research. Now, if Apple had decided to bundle in ZFS then you'd have a point, or maybe even ext4.

OSX does need maintenance IMO, but it doesn't need regular reinstallments or defragments. Just repair permissions occasionally and it runs fine. I've been running the same install of Tiger (10.4) for 3 years on a 6 year old machine just fine.

 

[Katier]

OSX does need maintenance IMO, but it doesn't need regular reinstallments or defragments. Just repair permissions occasionally and it runs fine. I've been running the same install of Tiger (10.4) for 3 years on a 6 year old machine just fine.

yeah wasn't saying it needed ZERO maintenance ( although might have appeared so ) just saying the level of maintenance is a LOT less.

 

[flea77]

Just wondering how you can chop the upgrade fee in half that mrogers mentioned without knowing what part he was refering to. i.e. Size and type of the harddisk, Size of the monitor, CPU/MB or display card type.

Would you mind sharing your secret? Do you have a special channel that you can get part really cheap?

And what's wrong with a $500 machine? I have machines that cost less than that ... and seems running fine. Well, I do not play games .. maybe that explains it.

Blash explained it quite well! If they were fine with a $500 machine a couple of years ago then the upgrades to bring it to the level of a current $500 machine would be quite inexpensive. He was also quite correct in pointing you to newegg.com, excellent source.

What's wrong with a $500 machine? They are generally made from the cheapest components possible, Chinese capacitors with extremely high failure rates, slower chipsets, power supplies that when they fail take out the motherboard too (Emachines is famous for this), shared memory video cards, slow hard drives, obscure components that rarely have driver updates, proprietary front panel connectors that you can never find a replacement board to fit, etc etc etc. As long as you realize you are buying a pile of junk up front, nothing wrong with buying a $500 machine every year or two.

It's like buying a Phoenix lens for your DSLR, if you do it to play with realizing it is a $100 500mm piece of junk, fine. But don't think it compares with a $5000 Canon L!

Allan

 

[elemental]

I will only purchase a mac (with all due respect - please don't try to convince me to buy a PC - I'm SET on a mac).

And it appears she's long gone.

But I hope all of you had fun with your inane "Mac vs. PC" debate, particularly when she spelled out that she wasn't looking for that.

 

[Dao]

So in other words, you mean this machine must be junk then. Since it cost less than $500 from Newegg.

Gateway DX4200-09 Phenom X4 9100e(1.8GHz) 4GB DDR2 640GB ATI Radeon HD 3200 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit - Retail


I thought this one is pretty powerful for regular user.

BTW, do you know that the problem capacitor issue affecting most of the big name in PC industry including Dell, Apple and HP? Original issue was related to a stolen formula. (HP had some issue later on with a Japanese manufacturer as well)

It is sad that, one of my gig switch at home was also affected. I had to replace the bad capacitors I took out from a old motherboard. I heard that it also affect some cameras as well. (oops .. I think I am off topic ... sorry )

 

[flea77]

So in other words, you mean this machine must be junk then. Since it cost less than $500 from Newegg.

Gateway DX4200-09 Phenom X4 9100e(1.8GHz) 4GB DDR2 640GB ATI Radeon HD 3200 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit - Retail

Yes:

1) Note the construction of the case, very dull finish on the metal inside and no cross support. This means very cheap metal which will tend to expand and contract a LOT when heated and cooled, this causes the screws in the motherboard etc to loosen causing grounding issues as well as problem with your optical drive alignment.

2) Graphics are on board which uses shared memory, much slower not to mention usually crippled as far as bus width is concerned, and possibly proprietary drivers (knowing Gateway).

3) Minimum expandability, only one PCI slot, and one full PCIE slot available.

4) Note the super-cheap power supply, bet cha $10 if it blows, it takes the MB with it! And only 300watts (of which it MIGHT do 220), hope you don't want to add a nice video card or two more hard drives!

5) If you look real close at the motherboard near the bottom below the installed card you will see two headers which are not finished out, typical of cheap motherboard bought in bulk, those used to be USB headers I will bet that were not finished off to save ten cents which limits your USB ports.

6) It states that the DVD drive supports LabelFlash, this means it is probably a very low end NEC drive.

So yes, I would classify that as junk.

BTW, do you know that the problem capacitor issue affecting most of the big name in PC industry including Dell, Apple and HP? Original issue was related to a stolen formula. (HP had some issue later on with a Japanese manufacturer as well)

It is sad that, one of my gig switch at home was also affected. I had to replace the bad capacitors I took out from a old motherboard. I heard that it also affect some cameras as well. (oops .. I think I am off topic ... sorry )

Actually you are talking about a specific problem they had with certain bad capacitors, I am talking about the general quality of all capacitors. As a rule Japanese caps are far superior to Chinese caps, and add to that you can step up to a motherboard that uses Conductive Polymer Capacitors. CPCs are far superior and last a lot longer.

Don't get me wrong, the machine you listed would be great for the kid's homework, grandma checking her email, etc as long as you realize the lack of durability, short life expectancy and expense of repairs (price a motherboard replacement for that thing, an actual factory replacement, WOW!)

Personally I count on my machine, if it goes down I am in hot water. I also want it to be reasonably fast, I hate waiting. So to me, anything less than say $800 or so is junk, $800-$1200 is inexpensive(good), $1200-$1500 is midrange(better), $1500 and up is higher end(best) (for desktops). Also note that these prices do not include keyboard, mouse, monitor(s), UPS, speakers, etc etc. The prices do include the operating system.

Equate that to lenses: Rokinon/Pheonix=toys(junk), Sigma/Tamron=cheap(good), Nikon/Canon=excellent(better), Zeiss=OMG!(best)

Allan

 

[Garbz]

And it appears she's long gone.

But I hope all of you had fun with your inane "Mac vs. PC" debate, particularly when she spelled out that she wasn't looking for that.

You can't expect a sane debate on this forum. Not about this topic anyway. Heck some people here think Gateway makes decent computers. That can only be taken on faith and thus all logical discussion goes out the window.

 

[WhineAndDine]

i read a few of the early responses and was quickly infuriated. this rumor that "macs are overpriced" needs to be killed. this is simply a MYTH. im in college, and in our computer science courses one of the first things the professors stress is that in the long run, both macs and PC's cost the exact same. mac's are more expensive in the beginning only because they come with everything. power, technology, reliability and beautiful design. PC's need upgrade after upgrade. im not even gonna get into the whole Macs actually work discussion because bitter PC users seem to be oblivious to the fact that their PCs are constantly crashing, need formatting, need restarts, virus scanners, malware removers and a host of other crap to keep them running. im not even gonna bring up vista because its self explanatory. plus keep in mind, ive never had to install a driver for anything in my life. You bitter PC users need to accept the fact that Macs JUST WORK....PERFECTLY....EVERYTIME.

Now that i blew off some steam, to address the original question.... for the best bang for your buck, go with the new Unibody Macbooks. They're powerful, gorgeous and also eco friendly. Not to mention that new glass trackpad and multi touch four finger gestures blow my mind. If you've never had a Mac before, get ready to be blown away by how perfectly everything works. i own a 24" iMac as well as a Macbook Air.

If you dont mind spending a little bit more, get the iMac. It is basically the God of desktop computers. I would not recommend a Macbook air though, i use it only for taking notes in class. Its really not that practical if you dont already own a "main" computer at home. think of it as a netbook. a really expensive and thin netbook lol.

 

[Dao]

Flea77. Just FYI, I do not own that Gateway. I just went to Newegg, select new PC from the range of $400-$500 and then just pick one from there. All I read was just the title "Gateway DX4200-09 Phenom X4 9100e(1.8GHz) 4GB DDR2 640GB ATI Radeon HD 3200 Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit - Retail". I do not even look at the pictures as well as the description details.

I just want to see what's your criteria of a junk machine. After seeing your explanation, I do not think I need to discuss on this subject with you anymore.

Now .. I am just wondering why a lot of corporate do not buy machines that cost $1000 or $1500 since their PCs is only for kids, grandma and are junks.