New Dell
Well, after several months of issues with my old desktop at home, I was finally sick of it and decided to take advantage of one of Dell's great deals. I remember when I first built my own computer. It felt like an accomplishment, since I've never been that handy with electronics or anything. Turns out building a basic computer isn't all that hard. But over the last couple years, it has become increasingly hard for the occasional hobbyist to keep up with all the compatibilities of memory, cpu, video cards, hard drive interfaces, etc. I've been giving it the old college try, but finally decided I would rather spend my time doing something other than troubleshooting a computer that I built and trying to add on components after the fact and get them to work. For instance, I recently tried an SATA RAID card in the attempts to combat various hard drive crashes and corruption issues I've been having, but the card seems flaky and I keep having to rebuild my machine (OS fails to load, sectors get corrupted, etc.).
I haven't had much chance to play with the new Dell yet as I just set it up last night, but a couple initial reactions. The free 19" LCD monitor is very nice, wow I can actually see a lot. I'm still considering pulling the graphic card out of my broken computer and hooking up my 15" as well and running dual-monitors. The biggest issue is where to put the dang thing in my little office. I was expecting the dual-core 2.8 ghz cpu to be a bit peppier to be honest. It does boot up fast and installs software really quickly, but doesn't seem that snappy in regular operations. Maybe I just need to do some tweaking. Also might want to add some more RAM. I also realized I've been out of the loop for awhile since the Dell has neither a old-school parallel printer port or any serial connections. So even my Microsoft Wireless mouse and keyboard need an adapter. For some reason the mouse has a USB connection, but the keyboard doesn't. After using the cheap Dell keyboard last night I'm not sure I can deal with it, so it's a PS2 to USB adapter the next time I go to MicroCenter. And I need to figure out how to hook up my printer as well. I have an old HP LaserJet 6P that has no USB connection, but it still works great and does everything I need a printer to do. I'm still on my original print cartridge after using it for probably over 5 years. Other than that, I really like the case although I haven't tried to get inside it yet. The machine is very quiet considering everything going on in there. So I'm pretty happy overall, especially with the price.