If I Were To Buy A Ready-made Computer

[Fierce Critter]

We went to Sam's Club and bought a membership. They have some limited-time (read: Buy this for Christmas!) packages in that Jon and I are hoping to buy ourselves around Christmastime.

Check out this link:

HP Computers at Sam's Club

I have it sorted by price, high to low. Because best-case scenerio, we want the full Monty - the $1399 system.

I know homemade jobs are highly recommended here. And that's still the direction we may go.

But if were were to just go with another ready-made system, these are the ones we'd consider.

If anyone has anything bad to say about HP, by all means, input welcome. But I will repeat what I've said before - every single HP product we have ever had - 1999 model Pavilion PC, Digital camera, printers, scanners, and more - has been exceptional in cost, function, reliability, etc. No HP product we've ever had has needed repair. eMachines will definitely never be in our home again. Epson printers can fuck off and die (or dry up and die as every single one has ever done for us). Pentax cameras? Not what they used to be. But HP, well, I'd consider naming my next two cats Hewlett & Packard... not that I'd add 2 more cats... a.n.y.w.a.y...

If we have the cash, we'd want the big guy. I'm going to say right now though that if we're impatient and want this around Christmas, we're going to have to go closer to $1000 or below.

Also keep in mind - we kept our HP Pavilion from 1999 through late 2004. We've had our eMachines T2858 with all of 512MB Ram, 80GB hard drive and 2800+ AMD Athlon processor since late 2004, and only just now upgraded our video card, DVD burner, and RAM to 1.5GB. We have almost filled up our 80GB drive before, and I had to move a lot of stuff to a portable HD. We tend to be overly patient with upgrading ourselves, never in much of a hurry for the "latest thing." I'm not fond of going to Vista, but I'll do what I must to finally be somewhat up-to-date with the best I can afford.

[Gaf The Horse With Tears]

Model - a6237c-b

Heres why.

Dual core 64 bit cpu powerful enough to run any game on the market with ease and then some.

3gigs of ram... which you need with Vista because

Onboard video card that can play 3d games decently but uses up to 648mb of system ram to do it. it takes it dynamically.. so it varies depending on what your doing. Vista needs 2gigs to runn well. So, that leaves that ram free for the vid card.

Expansion. When the on-board vid card isn;t powerfull enough for you anymore... the board has a Pci-express 16x slot... so you have a slot for a newer higher end card.

you have two PCI-express 1x for... well... video capture cards and such

You also have two PCI slots, one taken up by a 56k modem the other free for a wireless card.

btw... it would run XP just fine. You can get an OEM copy of XP for about $90 at a local computer show.

[Scary Guy]

The one at the bottom is still a dual 64 processor. These things are made to be disposable anyway (throw it out and then "upgrade" to a newer model) but will generally last a good 10 years or so (most schools can attest to this since that's usually when they get the funding to "upgrade"). It's tiny and powerful, so it's about as annoying as a new laptop. At least if it blows up you can save some important parts (hard drive, ROM drives). If you take proper care of it then it will last you a long time (don't you just love it when your CMOS battery dies?).

The only downfall is you can't upgrade the onboard video with an expansion card. But for the cash your saving it will be worth it, especially since I think you'll be "upgrading" shortly after. But then again you know I have no love for HP (and even less for Compaq, which they merged with).

[Fierce Critter]

The only downfall is you can't upgrade the onboard video with an expansion card.

Tech question: Why would I want to?

The GeForce card I have now is a nVidia GeForce FX 5500. It fits in with Second Life's "bare minimum required" level of system requirements. Still, it works. The $999 model (actually, all but the bottom one) has a GeForce 6100, which falls under SL's recommendations.

The $999 model has a 2.6ghz processor, the most expensive one has a 2.4. The one that falls in between has a 2.8. I think I don't need the most expensive one. I'm wondering about the benefits of the one that falls between...

[Scary Guy]

Tech question: Why would I want to?

The GeForce card I have now is a nVidia GeForce FX 5500. It fits in with Second Life's "bare minimum required" level of system requirements. Still, it works. The $999 model (actually, all but the bottom one) has a GeForce 6100, which falls under SL's recommendations.

The $999 model has a 2.6ghz processor, the most expensive one has a 2.4. The one that falls in between has a 2.8. I think I don't need the most expensive one. I'm wondering about the benefits of the one that falls between...

GeForce FX 5500 you say? What a piece of... hey wait, I use one of those. But yeah for gaming it's pretty much teh suck (and I don't game). The onboard card that comes with the bottom one should do everything you need it to and better considering it's a newer card with better technology. Also upgrading your card to work with other newer games that come out or to get more features isn't a bad idea, but not exactly necessary. Also if your card is AGP (which I'm guessing it is) then it won't work in the newer überPCI/X/E/I/E/I/O slot (basically forcing you to upgrade or go with the onboard (going with onboard still can be considered upgrading)).

Also like I said anything that has dual cores/chips is going to blow away anything with a single core (like a single core 2.8 will get killed by two 2.4's because it gives you virtually a 4.8... Though you don't actually get that speed you have two processors working so you're doing twice as much. Although they do say you never use all of your processing power.