Advise, please help!!!!!!! Or find someone that can help

[yoshito]

There is so much to think about, I'm getting a bit dizzy @_@. So far, it looks like I am getting a dell...I think?!? But I keep reading reviews about how horrible their service are

For all my bashing of them, they are pretty decent rigs. For the most part they are really good at warranting machines, at least I've had good warranty help from them. >.> Even though one dude was stupid enough long ago to actually tell me to go online and download the newest dial-up modem patches (before cable/dsl/satellite/etc.). Before he finished the sentence though he laughed and told me he'll send me the files (in the mail). Good thing I told him I got another PC so loaded that up and d/led the patch.

Anybody know if their call center was shipped out of the US?

Friend just bought a $600 rig to do some photoshop/website work and is quite happy with hers.

but I will say this--the G5 is pretty nice.

Don't you mean the Xbox 360? For those who don't get the joke, at E3 this year Microsoft was showing off Xbox 360 (Xbox 2) games which were found to be running off of G5 machines. =P

[Crystal]

In a few years people will ask, "So what are these Macs I hear about?"

People already don't know there was such an animal as "Apple" without the Mac part. >.>

Apple ][ for the win!

Let's hear it for the Apple IIe - whoooo hooo!

Ahh... Macintosh.. I was hopin' no one would bring them up. lol.. sorry folks, I'm not a big fan of Macs, but I will say this--the G5 is pretty nice. But, anything less than that is worthless as far as Macs go, IMO. (I really really despise the IMac)

*slinks away before a Mac-person starts throwing rocks at her*

Heh, heh. Well, if money wasn't a factor the G5 is what I'd get. What I have now is the PowerMac G4 (and an older one). But since it was given to me I'm not about to complain. The price was right. I know a lot of people don't like Macs of any flavor. They're never on sale. There's a new version of the OS out every 5 minutes it seems. The one button mouse (although that's changed now). Not as much software for them. Have I missed anything?

The upside, it doesn't crash (although IE has frozen up on me). It's quiet. I like the way the case pops open on mine, it's very tidy in there and even a technophobe like myself could add more memory. It can talk. . . I'm not always downloading fixes for it at least. I've gotten used to it but they aren't everyone's cup 'o tea certainly.

Of course the thing with any computer is that you can get a bad one right out of the box. Just ask Kitt how much trouble she's had with her new computer. And how many times she's taken it back. Or how much time she's spent with tech-support.

I like the Mac Store too. Every time I've gone there they are very helpful and encourage people to play with the shinies!

[RahOtaku]

Did you buy your computer yet?

Just curious.

Or what questions do you still have?

Because, really Brands mean nothing.

There are good HP's and bad HP's.

There are good Dells and bad Dells.

It's whats inside that matters.

Which particular model and parts did you chose?


^_^

[RahOtaku]

Also if you can don't buy the best processor.

Get a 2.5Gig Pentium if you don't play games.

Processors are in my experience the number one most expensive part to depreciate.


Also you can buy Hard Drives with Rebates for almost free.

So maybe buy a cheaper one and get a deal on a BIG hard drive with a Mail in rebate.

Really package deals aren't always deals.

^_^

All this requires labor and a friend who builds computers.

Or in other words one of us. ^_^

[yoshito]

Just read the newest Consumer Reports... seems that Apple, then Sony, then Dell are the top three for 2000-2004 age computers relating to least amount of serious problems/repairs.

[frozentime]

Let's hear it for the Apple IIe - whoooo hooo!

Ahh... Macintosh.. I was hopin' no one would bring them up. lol.. sorry folks, I'm not a big fan of Macs, but I will say this--the G5 is pretty nice. But, anything less than that is worthless as far as Macs go, IMO. (I really really despise the IMac)

*slinks away before a Mac-person starts throwing rocks at her*

Wasn't going to bring up the Mac Option, but since someone else did, I'll also put in my 2Yen.

I grew up on PC's (after the TI99/4a and TRS80), but currently have a G5 PowerPC and an IBook (G4). Also use a G4 at work, in addition to a Sun workstation, and remotely run few Microsoft terminal servers, a G5 cluster and a Silicon Graphics. I'm not a system builder or administrator, just have to run some intense simulations.

Agree about the G5. Benchmarked my home unit against the 8 processor SG at work (which was a few years older) and found its two processor performance was nearly twice that of the 8 processor tool at work, for the applications we run. It definitely screams, and looks nice doing it.
G4's are definitely an old architecture, but probably not as bad as people think. Not all of the application really take advantage of the architecture, and the machines with the G4 don't often come with a fast bus, or memory. In general performance vs. price compare pretty closely with the PCs and Macs. It just depends on what you like and what you want to do. Because of the new Unix platform (glad OS9 is long gone) system crashes are almost unheard of on a Mac, though applications can still crash.

If you want to game, and don't have time to do a little research to find appropriate software, I wouldn't even consider the Mac. If you don't care about gaming, but like ease of use, do heavy graphics processing, or like programming in Unix (:)), then I would consider a Mac in the comparison. Off the shelf you can get similar price vs performance, but the Mac's price probably wouldn't come close to what you could get by building the PC .

[zerospace]

I couldn't have said it better myself, frozentime... I used to work with the occasional Mac and mostly Sun Solaris workstations at school - had to run some intense programs on them for my research projects. Unix really kicks butt for number-crunching.

In any case - let us know what you end up getting, Ashura

Sorry to have thrown so much geek-speak into all of this.. apparently, I just can't help it. I love computers... until they break on me. - then, you're likely to see a demonstration of gravity or some other form of physics as I hurl one off my second floor porch or stomp on a fried and out-of-warranty component! (never actually thrown anything off my porch, but I've been oh-so-tempted to but I have stomped on a dead power supply and snapped dead motherboards in half... hehe )