PC Died. Build or buy?

[lancer]

Great line about the barbie dolls

6) Pricing - Dell will offer rock bottom pricing on low end machines but expect to pay extra for a performance machine. That is how they make there money - give away the Barbie dolls and charge a fortune for the dresses. For a decent gaming machine price will be the same or lower if you reuse your XP liscence, case, mouse, kybd, etc and build your own. You will get a decent monitor bundled in with the Dell system.

As i said, completely agree a lot of the onboard sound rivals the cards, there are some major differences, but without and awesome set of b&o headphones or speakers, you will probably not notice.

9) Sound cards - why waste your money unless you are an audiophile.

Let us know how it goes leedogg, good luck.

 

[leedogg]

I do have a harman kardon home theatre system hooked up to my pc for sound, so the sound card should be worthwhile.

So I'll give vista a shot, even though I hate the candy interface. I also forgot to include the price of vista premium in my setup, which would be another 100 or so...

 

[LeeJend]

Leejand, perfectdisk works in vista now, has for awhile

The new version of perfect disk which you have to buy all over again works in vista. The older versions do not. Same with diks keeper, Nero, Photoshop, MS Office, etc.

The point is you have to buy new software to be Vista compatible. That can mean $1000 or more for the privilege of running your existing aplicaitons on an experimental OS.

Bad financial idea.

 

[lancer]

photoshop back to 7 backs on vista without anything new, so does ms office.

don't be a vista hater leejand haha

 

[Shamus MacNoob]

I aggree with Leejend why should we have to buy software all over ? Vista is nothing that great for those of us that pay for software it sure aint worth the trouble. I use Vista on a machine but it is a secondary and only because I need to learn first hand about the quirks and configuration of this pos OS for work , maybe in 3 years we will install at work ... maybe

 

[Maveric169]

One other thing that wasn't mentioned that I thought I would point out in the defference between building or buying (especially from dell) is that if you buy one from dell your going to have a ton of crap trial software on it, and I mean a ton! Took 4 hrs to uninstall/remove registry keys and clean up the HDD to get all that crap off my friends brand new gaming machine he bought. It is one of the main reasons I like building my own, not to mention when you build you know everything is brand new, Dell (and many others also) like to use refurbished parts inside. Sure you have a warentee but you have to deal with your system down or out while you try to get it fixed/replaced. Dell usually wants you to send the whole system to them for repair, even as far as "open the case = void of certain warentee's".

 

[leedogg]

So yeah, its not worth the hassle of building another one to save a questionable 1-200 bucks. I'll pay dell this amount to put everything together for me. The risks involved with building my own currently outweigh the benefits.

Here's the system:

XPS 720, Intel Core2 Duo processor E6750 (2.66GHz,1333FSB) w/DualCore Technology and 4MB cache
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
WD, Raptor 160GB NCQ 10K SATA Hard Drive w/16MB DataBurst Cache
16X DVD+R/RW CD-RW Combination Drive
X-Fi PCI Sound Card
No Preinstalled Software
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, English

$200 instant coupon
Free shipping
$200 dell dollar coupon (torwards a future dell purchase - will be for a second 22" Samsung 226BW for a dual LCD setup)

$1559.00 (or $1359.00 counting the dell dollars)

Cant wait!! One question. Is Ultimate worth the upgrade over premium?

 

[Tuffgong4]

I don't see it as being a great upgrade over premium. Especially for the cost. If you are not doing anything with being on domains or anything you should be fine with premium.

I have ultimate on my laptop and home premium !Suprise! at home.