Building a new computer

cArNaGe wrote:My opinion is since your last computer is close to 10 years old, I would just buy one. Look for good deals at http://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9 or http://forums.anandtech.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16
but
If you can salvage some parts from your current machine you may want to build.

OS: I would absolutely go with windows 7 64 bit, xp is old and soon not to be supported. But you could save yourself $100 by keeping xp. But remember xp is a 32 bit os, unless you have xp 64.
Reason I'm mentioning that is with an xp 32 bit os you limit yourself to 3.2 gigs of ram.

You will want a minimum of a dual core processor. Quad core being preferred.

Any off the shelf machine can do what you want with the exception to gaming. But then you could just add a video card.

e.alleg wrote:what if I buy the best PCI video card they make

PCI? Not PCI e?

You say no AGP slots so I'm thinking PCI
Take a look at this baby http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814150460
Now thats a card.

$700+ for a vid card yea the wife will like that one. I have PCI, not PCI-E

Me and the wife are still running Pentium 4 computers here for desktops. Add 2 gig ram, a decent pci video card and 7200 rpm or faster hard drive and you should be ok. What speed is the p4? The motherboard might be able to go up to 2.8 or 3.2 p4 depends on the bus speed.

This one here doesn't look too bad for the price. http://dealnews.com/lw/artclick.html?2,341595,1092133 $449 plus shipping, no monitor but they do give you a keyboard and mouse.

I have been building PC's since the late 80's. My suggestion to all my customers is to buy the fastest CPU that they can afford, then when time, necessity, and money affords itself, upgrade the memory, hard drive, video, etc, as they are an easy upgrade for just about any user....

But on a side note, my personal computers are Mac's, just my preference.

This is a pretty good deal for $299. These are refurb vista machines with free Win 7 upgrade. You can also use BING cash back & save.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=5140

Uhh....following this advice would be your WORST move. Worst Buy is a silly place to shop. Wouldn't buy coal at Walmart now would you?

stokerscot wrote:I'd go to Best Buy. They offer warranty and sevice what they sell. If you can't build your own.

spc wrote:This is a pretty good deal for $299. These are refurb vista machines with free Win 7 upgrade. You can also use BING cash back & save.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=5140

That's where I bought this cpu I'm using now. It's a refurb'd HP, 5 Gigs RAM, 580 Gig hard drive, quad-core AMD Phenom processor. Worked great when I first got it. Starting to get quirky though ... just like the last one. Difference is, I paid over $1000 for that one at Best Buy for JUST the cpu ... no monitor, no speakers, nothing! Just a keyboard & mouse.

I think these issues have more to do with Windows, than the cpu itself.

This one here from Tiger was under $500 WITH shipping. Eventually I'm going to wipe the drive & start over from scratch. Seems to be the only way to fix these damn things.

My advice as an IT Professional and avid gamer is...
Now I'm not going to be pushing HP for any reason other than their customer support is awesome, something Dell's support USED to be. Thus I'm now supporting HP.

Try getting an HP desktop, something with a nice processor (usually the most difficult part to upgrade) and whatever nice features you like on it, BUT don't spring for extra memory or other things YOU can upgrade yourself. You have the experience and ability to be able to upgrade those as you wish later and at a much better price. You'll be covered by HP's great warranty service for at least the first year and you get interesting little bells and whistles you won't be able to get in such a clean package if you build your own. I personally do just that, use HP machines or cases and build on from there. Its overall cheaper for me and I have a brand name behind the machines I sell my clients. For the top-end machines, yes building your own from the ground up is your best bet. But you aren't looking for that. You're looking for a nice machine and stability. Which you'll get by building on top of a solid machine. The idea I gave you may not be the cheapest, but sometimes spending a little just for stability is worth it, especially if you're not completely at ease building one yourself. You won't be saving THAT much by building your own from the ground up and you WILL have to buy an operating system.

Operating systems (OS), by all licenses sold to the general public, die with a machine. You CANNOT use the OS from an older machine if you change the motherboard and processor, as it is now a NEW machine. Legally anyway. You must replace a motherboard or processor with an exact or similar if exact is not available part in case it fails. You also can NOT remove the OS from one machine and install it on another, to say, well its only on ONE. That violates the licensing agreement you agreed to when you originally purchased or installed the OS. Another reason to go with a pre-built. Of course if you are feeling adventurous and want to build your own machine, you could always save the OS money and use an Open Source OS, although you will again be sacrificing stability and compatibility for money. Just my two cents. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Good luck! Have fun!

-Fahad

You should, as I usually do with prebuilts, start with a clean install. You will gain quite a bit in performance by removing a lot of bloatware. Additionally, you can be sure that after that point, any issues were, either simply hardware failures or software issues caused by poor surfing habits

SMITTY wrote:

spc wrote:This is a pretty good deal for $299. These are refurb vista machines with free Win 7 upgrade. You can also use BING cash back & save.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=5140

That's where I bought this cpu I'm using now. It's a refurb'd HP, 5 Gigs RAM, 580 Gig hard drive, quad-core AMD Phenom processor. Worked great when I first got it. Starting to get quirky though ... just like the last one. Difference is, I paid over $1000 for that one at Best Buy for JUST the cpu ... no monitor, no speakers, nothing! Just a keyboard & mouse.

I think these issues have more to do with Windows, than the cpu itself.

This one here from Tiger was under $500 WITH shipping. Eventually I'm going to wipe the drive & start over from scratch. Seems to be the only way to fix these damn things.

Thanks for the replies, when it came down to real dollars leaving my pocket I fixed my old one. $25 for a new DVD writer and $160 for a new 24" Gateway monitor (thanks newegg daily deals) and I'm happy again. I did some cleaning to the system as well I mean physically I took the heat sink off and blew out all the dust inside the case took it all apart cleaned all the fans and passages put all back together ran disk cleanup cleaned out all the crap programs and it runs fast again. System specs Pentium 4 2.00 GHz / 2 GB ram / 160gb HD / DVD R/W lightscribe.

You're welcome! Did you remember to reapply thermal compound between the heatsink and processor before you reinstalled it? Good to see its running well again, but remember "fast" is a relative term... I'd go so far as to say its not really running fast, just fastER. But because its a P4 I can tell you its running HOT! P4s are known to be exceedingly inefficient. Please make sure you clean off the old and reapply new thermal compound to the heatsink/cpu if you have not already! I stress this! Else you will be buying a new system!

Anyway, just don't expect to do as you said and "go out and buy any new computer game and play it." It won't happen. But carry on soldier, carry on!

By the way, can your video card display the full resolution of your new monitor?

card is NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 32mb circa 2002 it does the native resolution of 1920x1080 which is the highest it can do, no DVI or HDMI ports on the card so I run the monitor in VGA mode although it's a HDMI and DVI capable screen. It's not bad but certainly not ideal. My biggest problem is the USB ports are not 2.0 so when trying to use a flash drive it's tedious, so I got a DVD burner and a stack of 4.7GB writable DVD's so it's pretty fast to backup data now. Plus the lightscribe feature is cool it burns the label on.

Wow, I actually had an MX420 64mb. Good ol' days. Anywho... to fix the USB issue you can get a USB 2.0 card that'll add several internal and external ports. That would be a PCI add-on card and should only be $10-15. I would pay to have 2.0 ports, its just THAT much faster.

Lightscribe may be cool but it takes too long and the discs are relatively expensive for what it does.
Sharpie is my choice.

Good luck and let me know if I can help anymore.

e.alleg wrote:card is NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 32mb circa 2002 it does the native resolution of 1920x1080 which is the highest it can do, no DVI or HDMI ports on the card so I run the monitor in VGA mode although it's a HDMI and DVI capable screen. It's not bad but certainly not ideal. My biggest problem is the USB ports are not 2.0 so when trying to use a flash drive it's tedious, so I got a DVD burner and a stack of 4.7GB writable DVD's so it's pretty fast to backup data now. Plus the lightscribe feature is cool it burns the label on.

Viper, check your New Messages at the top of the screen.

checked and replied, thanks!