MY COMPUTER TOOK A DUMP!! SUGGESTIONS FOR A NEW ONE? (BUDGET FRIENDLY!!!)

[Khyron]

Thank you FLG for giving me some faith back

If your ever in Upstate NY and need a job, we can talk heheheh The fact that "The same companies make the components" is just unbelievable simplistic it's not even funny. yeah... it's all silicon so it's all from the same planet so it's all the same...... it's enough to bang my head on the table...

I need to get out of this field... too many "Experts" in it. 

[FLG]

Thank you FLG for giving me some faith back

If your ever in Upstate NY and need a job, we can talk heheheh The fact that "The same companies make the components" is just unbelievable simplistic it's not even funny. yeah... it's all silicon so it's all from the same planet so it's all the same...... it's enough to bang my head on the table...

I need to get out of this field... too many "Experts" in it. 

Where and when buddy? Ive been working my small home based business for awhile now. It gets some new parts put on the charger but not quite enough 

[jeryst]

Just how many hard drive, motherboard, chipmakers do you think are out there? One company will make components under dozens of names and labels, so you think you are getting something different, when you are really just getting the same thing rebranded. There are differences, sure, but to the average home user, it makes little difference. We tried all different brands at work. emachines, Acer, Dell, gateway, HP. Overall, the "Brand" names did not justify their much higher costs, and we were able to save the company tons of money by using the cheaper brands with hardly any adverse effects. For example, we have a 7 year old emachines that went through 3 different people, was used on the plant floor for a while, then eventually wound up being a specialized file server. Its still running strong, and doing its job admirably, all without any repairs. And just so you know, all of this was done in a heavy manufacturing environment, serving over thousands of employees and over 1000 PC's, so you can say what you want, but the "Expert" crack works both ways.

[Silver R/T]

www.newegg.com get all the parts there and build your own. You'll save hundreds of dollars.

[Arthu®]

I agree and disagree with jeryst post granted some of the lesser name brand PC's are quite good. Alot of people hear "Dell" or "Gateway", "Toshiba" and they "know" those brands. But unless your in the field of technology people look at "Acer", and "Asus" are are think "Oh i never have heard of them so they must not be good".

Honestly for ALL my computer builds i only use quality components, and that means EVERY build i do is with an Asus motherboard. As for Acer i dont use them regularly, but i have used plenty of Acer monitors and have had great luck (no dead/stuck pixels, and pretty good resolution)

But the one thing i dont agree with is eMachines....what bags of crap. Great for a cheap computer that you just "need" but i would NEVER point a customer near one. Cheap components!!! Especially the power supplies. And im sorry but all PC's are NOT the same inside...yes same components but heck no not the same quality.

They skimp on basically everything, as for MOBO's ECS, Biostar, or Foxccon garbage, and no name PSU's, Hitachi deskstar (or shall i say "deathstar") HDD's and crappy DVD drives.

I always tell my customers, if you want CHEAP go to the store and buy one. I refuse to build PC's with inferior components. Mainly all my builds consist of Fortron Source PSU's, ASUS mobo's, and im a little bias towards seagate HDD's, though i will go with Maxtor, or Western Digital if their on sale, any good quality DVD drive that's on sale, and a quality monitor.

Ive been registered to www.pcmech.com/forum since 2003 (im 21 now so yes ive been doing this since im 15 years old) i havent visited in a LONG time since i finally got my mopar and really have a very good grasp on PC's.  I started working on PC's by grabbing whatever i found in the trash, then being able to mess around with things without having to worry about breaking stuff.

Ok I by no means have a ton of experience with computers in the sense that I have an education on the subject, but I have been messing around with them and building them since I was 16 years old. Now I agree with you on the ASUS motherboards I too have only build PC's with their motherboards and I have great experiences with them. You still get what you pay for to some degree though. Acer laptops... Maybe you experience varies from mine, but what I have seen is that the ones that are actually a lot cheaper than the brand names also have a poor build quality, the parts individually might not be bad of quality, but the casing looks and feels cheap and is anything but robust. The PC I have now is the first one I didn't build myself, it is a laptop, so it's kind of hard to build those yourself. It's also a brand that not a lot of people know, but I'm very satisfied with it. The brand is MSI I have their GX620, originally made for Vista, but as everybody knows that was a piece of crap, so I am now running x64 XP Professional and it is lightning fast. I can recommend their products to anyone. Great support forums as well, because I got it when it was just out and the x64 XP drivers were not released yet so I had to do some digging to make it work and they were very helpful.

Arthur

[FLG]

I honestly cant say too much for Acer laptops. Ive seen a few, seemed people were happy with em and ive used them for LCD's a few times and have had good luck.

As for MSI, i actually bought the GX720 for a customer (believe its the same as the 620 just a bit higher end) and i gotta say, i was very very happy with the performance, looks, and feel of the unit (man that line can sure be taken out of context). With Acer laptops i noticed its just plane jane in the past, nothing special. I haven't looked at their newer stuff, but it does seem to be a little more visually appealing and maybe more robust. 

MSI has always been on the fence with me. They did have what seemed like more quality control issues in the past but seemed to have been good since than.

[451-74Charger]

I swear by Dell.
My wife and I both have Inspiron laptops, We have a Sony Desktop and a Dell Precision for my "desktop" and a Poweredge servers.
Total cost for ALL this hardware???
Less than $1000
Get an Inspiron 1525 or Studio15 for home use, you'll love it.

[Arthu®]

I honestly cant say too much for Acer laptops. Ive seen a few, seemed people were happy with em and ive used them for LCD's a few times and have had good luck.

As for MSI, i actually bought the GX720 for a customer (believe its the same as the 620 just a bit higher end) and i gotta say, i was very very happy with the performance, looks, and feel of the unit (man that line can sure be taken out of context). With Acer laptops i noticed its just plane jane in the past, nothing special. I haven't looked at their newer stuff, but it does seem to be a little more visually appealing and maybe more robust. 

MSI has always been on the fence with me. They did have what seemed like more quality control issues in the past but seemed to have been good since than.

The only difference between the GX620 and GX720 is the 17" display I believe. I have the smaller 15.4" which suited me better because at home I use a 24" HD screen and the 15.4 is just a little easier to handle when using it as a laptop.

I can't speak about the newer Acer laptops, the only experience I had was with their line of about 2/3 years ago. Like I said I'm not really an expert I'm just a guy that a lot of people think knows something about PC's and therefore they dump all their problems on me... I don't really know why I keep solving them free of charge though.

Arthur

[MoparManJim]

Well I had a compaq, it work very very well for what I mostly do. Then one night between around 1AM to around at least 7AM something happen to it and the system wouldn't even start back up for me. Not even to the restore area on the system. I went out and got a Dell Vista system and let me tell you I hate the dang thing. It doesn't hardly do anything, the burner mess's up when I'm online and not doing anything. The audio thing doesn't work right either and I went through adjusting it and still doens't work like it should. When I turn the computer on it takes me alittle while to get online because the stupid michine takes like 3 to 5 minutes to go through the system checking for updates  and then it tells me which it slows the system down. When I do update the system when i get updates it still does the same thing. It's always updating itself and it can't be that far out of date  . Give me a Compaq anyday. So my sugjection to you would be find a Compaq one  .

[jeryst]

I dont think you ever mentioned what price range you are looking for. Last night I went to Walmart, and they have a Toshiba laptop for $400, and an HP for $500. They had a nice HP desktop for under $600. They had a couple Dell systems, but they were more.

[RusTy/SE]

Consider IBM - now Lenovo - as an option. Some five years ago, my 'shop', the Department of Industrial Relations, State of Alabama, rolled out approximately 500 IBM 8189 ThinkCentre pcs to personnel in local employment offices statewide. They've been tanks enduring all sorts of conditions while basically operating 24/7. About the same time I purchased an 8187 desktop model virtually identical to the one in the link below.

http://www.superwarehouse.com/IBM_ThinkCentre_M50_8187/8187E3U/p/290472

It never so much as hicupped until a few months ago when the memory started deteriorating. After replacing the original 256k memory stick with a pair of 512 sticks, all is fine again. Regardless of which make/model you decide on, by all means look into external hard drives as mentioned earlier. One as the main drive, the second as backup. These days external drives come with built in security features as well.

We've just begun the next big pc replacement/rollout, this time using 600 HP Thin Clients - the 'cpu' mounts behind the flat panel display - trending towards HP products (I always wanted to use 'trending' in a sentence, lol) and at least so far seem to be holding up fine.

Russ

[mopar_nut_440_6]

Consider IBM - now Lenovo - as an option.

We've just begun the next big pc replacement/rollout, this time using 600 HP Thin Clients - the 'cpu' mounts behind the flat panel display - trending towards HP products (I always wanted to use 'trending' in a sentence, lol) and at least so far seem to be holding up fine.

Russ

I have a IBM Lenovo as a home PC and it has been great until my wife picked it up by the display and cracked it.  Ouch. Cheapest one I can find is about 200 bucks!

We also have the HP thin clients in 25 of our medical facilities and they work great. They actually have a small water cooling system on the cpu, cool!!

[buie1289]

Just thought I would chime in here. I own an IT firm based in TN. We have been resellers for HP and IBM/Lenovo for years now. We used to be resellers for Dell, but ended up having to drop them due to reliability issues. Here's my 

Little known fact: For most mainstream manufacturers there are 2 very distinct model lines, home/home office and business. For the most part, the home/home office stuff is absolutely trash. They have a life expectancy of roughly 2 years on average. They're marketed to death and mass produced with the absolute cheapest components to be had. There seems to be very little in the way of standards relating to hardware in these model lines. They are marketed squarely at the general public with one thing in mind, price point. For most average consumers, there is little to no brand loyalty anyway, only price loyalty, so manufacturers aren't really striving to make you buy their home line brand over and over.

When you move into the business sector, things change quite a bit. Average life expectancy goes to 5 to 7 years. Manufacturers typically want to be sure that business are brand loyal, so they product they turn out is very good. There's excellent R&D time spent on the hardware components, there's absolute consistency relating to hardware components, the PCs are free from all that "Free" software and bloatware found on the home versions and they last! As an IT integrator, we support somewhere around 35,000 desktop PCs for our various customers. Some of them are HP and some are IBM/Lenovo, but all of them are business line machines. It is a rare occurence that we have a hardware issue with one of them. Typically they are replaced only for the next fastest model and we get the old ones back, still working.

How do you know if it's home or business? Simple. If you purchase it retail, then 9 times out of 10 it is home/home office. For HP, their Pavilion line and Compaq Presario lines are home/home office, so I would stay away from those.

You can buy the business line off most any manufacturer's website by going to their business section, and in most cases the prices are fairly close to the home/home office stuff. I guarantee that you will have MUCH better results.