[sleemie]

A friend of mine has asked me to help her make a decision on buying a PC. Although I'm a tech support dweeb on my job, I have not really kept up with the latest and greatest in terms of what brands are decent. The general buzz that I seem to get is that people are leaning more towards Dell than Gateway, that people haven't really been satisfied with Gateways recently. Beyond that, I don't know. What about the brands in Best Buy and Circuit City...Sony, Hewlet Packard, Compaq, e-machine, etc. Which brand is good to go with? Keeping in mind she wants to keep the cost as low as possible, but of course not buying a piece of crap. Also, what's the difference between a Pentium 4 and Celeron Processor? Should she go with the 4 over celeron? The only thing I really know to tell her is the minimum of RAM to go with, which I say 256 for what she wants to do, which is basically just surf the net and other basic stuff people do at home, a little word processing and stuff like that. She doesn't play computer games or get in to any heavy multi-media stuff. Also, I told her to get a CD-Writer. It seems all of the newer systems come with enough of the other stuff she would need, processor speed, hard drive space, powerful enough video card, etc. so I don't want to confuse her by mentioning minimums for all of that stuff. RAM and lack of a CD Writer seemed to be the only things I saw lacking in some of these systems. Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions???

Thanx a bunch.

[Cosmic]

If price is the prime objective, you probably can't beat the price of the e-machines, get it on sale. If you ask at Best Buy, they may have a demo unit or one where the box has been opened, get even more off.

I don't buy branded computers but that would be my choice for the super low price. I bought one of their monitors at Best Buy (17") on sale, with rebate and open box discount of $88. Nice little tube for my emergency backup computer.

I would probably up gun to at least 512 RAM as an add in. A Zip drive is nice, for little money. So many uses, I like to keep a Zip disk of all the little goodies software needed to set up a new machine, plus make a backup of all my favorites on a disk, use as a work area, always download everything to a Zip, never to a hard drive. Zip disks just about never fail, back up your registry, settings, critical files. These "Modern" hard drives fail far to often for my taste. Can't just have one. Maybe stick in another smaller hard drive, even a used one. These modern machines need a physical different drive to make a backup. You need to have backups in at least two different drives. Seeing as how, you don't get a full installation OS pak, backups are very important. Zip drives last forever, just move them to a newer machine.

Might consider an add on external hard drive as a USB external. A CD burner should be the minimum. Throw away that 3.5 floppy drive, all the new ones are trash, replace with an older heavy one with the aluminum frame.

If you have a good junk box and are handy one of those super cheap e-machines probably could be made into a fair work horse. Tough to buy a machine and then spend a lot adding what you really wanted. Really want to think reliability and what is required to keep it top condition. Can get most of the software, Spybot, Adware, SpyWareBlaster, etc here as mentioned in the security section to make it always a pretty clean machine.

[faithchris]

I bought a Gateway in 2002 and still have some of the same problems with them. I am not crazy about there help but they aren't to bad I guess. I also understand Dell personal computers (this is only hearsay) gives you help but no one seems to be able to speak english very well, I think the calls go thru another country. Big Business's however get there help from here in the US. Other than that I could of just gotten a computer built on Friday near the end of the day who knows. Good Luck