I am use to IBM type PCs and that's what I'll have at work %26amp; volunteer work.
I want to be able to:
edit audiofiles in programs like sound forge %26amp; sound architect and burn cds - I volunteer with church media ministry and I'm remastering audiotapes using telex-zing in media office %26amp; would like to be able to do some work at home.
I have a digital camera and want to edit and store pictures - what storage do I need?
We wordproecess
We use internet %26amp; email
We run learning programs
My daughter wants to get an ipod
I'd won't be able to replace this new one soon so I don't want the minimum
I'd really appreciate serious answers, Thank you.Buying a new PC in next 6 months some advice from techexperts?
A few things to think about when purchasing a computer.
1.) How long is the warranty?
2.) Does it have the features that you need and is it capable of expansion for future needs?
3.) How much do you want to spend?
4.) How good is the companies support service?
Most of these can be found by going to sites that sell computer equipment, they have reviews.
And if price is omportant never buy more machine then you think you will need in the next 3-5 years.
But the most important thing is to always remember You have to be happy with your purchase.Buying a new PC in next 6 months some advice from techexperts?
Ok, first things first. You don't need something with a WHOLE bunch of RAM, cause it's expensive and really won't serve a purpose for the both of you. Grab something with 256 MB if possible.
Secondly, you should opt for a bigger hard drive, considering the amount of work you do. 120 GB should do you.
Other than that, grab a decent processor, I'd say 1.8 GHz or better, and you're off to the races.
The first place to start is cost. How much can you afford to spend?
The second place to work from is the operating system.
Linux - It's free, it will chop $70-100 off the cost of your computer if you get one with no OS or with Linux installed. All of the software to do what you want to do will be free. More reliable, more secure. No need to purchase software like anti-virus, popup blockers and such.
Downside. - Requires a bit of adjusting. To me Linux is far easier to use. Part of it is just that is what I've been using for a long time. Most things truely are easier to do under Linux. Most people are used to Window's annoyances and so the adjustment curve can be considered hard. Also some software like many games will not run under Linux.
Windows - If you plan to put windows on the machine then plan for Vista. In other words get 2 gigs of ram at the least. Get the largest hard drive offered. You'll need it and buy a top end machine because it's going to seem very slow soon as Vista stomps on it. No point putting Xp or W2k on the machine. You'll just have to upgrade to Vista in a short time as support for those operating systems wane. So by going with Windows you are looking at a far heavier cost in hardware. To do what you have described in Linux you could easily use a low end CPU, half a gig of RAM and a 100 gig hard drive and have very good performance and get at least 4 to 5 years usage from the machine.
One factor to consider is your learning software. It is possibly windows only and may not run on an emulator.
Ok now that you know what Operating system you want to run you can spec out the hardware.
Linux
Whatever CPU is availible, it'll be plenty fast. AMD's are less expensive as a CPU but require much more effor to cool so the cost is about equal between AMD and Intel systems after you add in cooling.
Memory. The more the better for any OS. Min of 2 gigs for Windows, min 500 megs for Linux.
Hard drive. Min of 100 gigs.
Sound card - How are you importing sounds? YOu may want or need a Midi or other types of input on your sound card. If your already using a break out box then this is meaningless. Still if your doing alot of sound editing you probably want a decent sound card. Creative is really the standard today so go with a mid-level Creative sound card.
Nic cards - Have at LEAST 10/100. Most systems today come with 10/100/1g nic cards. Since you plan to use this for some time look for a nic card capable of 1giga bit traffic. That is what is coming and will be standard before the machine you plan to purchase is junked. It is not essential. You can always add a nic card down the road for relitively low costs. Just something that will give one system more value over another if all else is equal.
Unless your playing high end computer games or using very high end video editing software the run of the mill video card will suffice. The real issue is that high end video cards cost s a bunch. Stick with Nvidia or ATI video cards. The competitors use those chips and just rebrand them but can have incompatability issues. Do you need a video input? If so you will almost certainly have to purchase an upgraded or seperate video card.
Consider buying a break out box instead of a high end sound card. You can get one for less than $100 that is USB and will handle 1/4 inch inputs (you can use adaptors for others) and often comes with low end versions of software like sound forge for editing. Doing so will greatly improve the quality of the sound files you are bringing in.
In terms of CDroms, you want DVD read and burning capability. Don't even bother with a machine that doesn't come default with that already. The speeds of modern cd/dvds is more than sufficient. So if it's 44x or 50x who cares?
Now that you have a hardware list it's time to decide what machine to purchase.
The two main branches here are White boxes or propriatory machines. A White box is one built by yourself or a local computer shop. These are the highest and lowest quality machines you can buy. A good White box will be faster, cheaper and last far longer than any propriatory machine you can buy. If you buy a name brand machine you know for a fact your getting less than top quality, but you also get a known level of quality. So while it's slower, more expensive and a disposable machine it's a surer bet.
The quality can vary greatly with a White box. One machine I put together myself 10 years later got junked just because it was too old to do anything usefull any more. Everything still worked. I had to replace the floppy drive once and put 3 successively larger hard drives in it but that was it. It worked and worked and worked. Never quit. On average I get about 5 years out of a white box if I never upgrade it. I did have one die on me after 18 months. It was out of warrentee and suffered catastrophic failure in multiple components. I think the power supply started spiking the rest of the components. Another only lasted a little over 2 years before mother board failure.
Normally after about 3 years I will upgrade the mother board, CPU and RAM on a White box and have essentially a whole new faster computer. Changes in technology mean that you only get one or two upgrades like this but doing this I have a few machines that have lasted several years with periodic expenditures of $70-150 every 3 to 4 years. Upgrading a machine in such a way is easy to do. So when you buy a White box you really buy multiple machines at the same time.
With a name brand you buy a disposable computer. You cannot upgrade it down the road. You can put bigger hard drives in but many name brand cases make it difficult or impossible to add drives. So you cannot just add extra drive space you have to replace the old drive. Built in components sometimes are difficult to turn off so you cannot easily add a video card, a SCSCI controller or other upgrades to your machine. Few name brand machines come with more than 2 or 3 slots today. So if you go with a higher end video card and sound card and have to add a faster Nic card your done. You cannot add that special whiz bang card you want to without reverting back to the built in card. Most White boxes come with 4 to 7 availible slots. That means you can add a SATA raid card, SATA drives, extra nic cards, a better sound and Video card and STILL have room for more cards.
Which brings us to Hard drives. This is a tough choice right now. SATA is possibly the future of hard drives. It is also far from certain. Many SATA controllers are buggy and give people fits. SATA drives are noticably more expensive than IDE drives. SATA however allows for Raid functions, multiple drives and promises to be faster and a more flexable way of using devices like hard drives and cdroms. SATAs may compitition is USB drives. These drives are also expensive but are very portable. They are also dirt slow. However USB is deffinitely the future. The question is will USB or SATA be the primary drive in five years? Guess wrong and you have a drive system that is obsolete. So my advice would be to stick to IDE drives while that gets sorted out. If you buy a White box you can inexpensively add a SATA controller down the road. Many White boxe's come with both SATA and IDE controllers already. USB is plug and play so as long as you have slots no big deal.
That brings me to USB slots. The more the better. Pay attention as most devices today are going to be USB devices. Printers, scanners, hard drives, thumb drives and so on. Do NOT get a USB keyboard and mouse. That steals two of your USB slots for very low data usage devices and just clogs the USB channels with data best used off the PCI bus. BIOSes still do not really support the USB keyboards and mice with full compatability so there are minor annoyances using them. If you want an extender for either device that's tough. More so it makes it more of a pain to get to your USB ports. Almost forces you to buy a USB box to connect all your USB devices which slows them all down. Get a PS2 keyboard and mouse. Save your USB slots for cameras, printers and such. Devices that really need them. Look for the number and type of USB slots. Make sure that you have USB 1 compatable slots. There are lots of devices out there which have to revert to USB 1 to work at all with some bios chip sets. Also if Uncle Joe brings over his old USB device which uses USB 1 you want him to be able to plug in. At least theoritcally. You might not like Uncle Joe :) Most USB slots will be USB 2 by default and support older devices, but you want to look at that and be sure. Having USB slots on the front of the computer is a nice feature. Makes it MUCH easier to get to them. Caution, Dell's are notorious for thier front USB slots being fickle.
Now it's time to look for the machine that you want. Do you risk buying a White box for the added value, peformance and durability or do you stick with safe slow performing disposable name brand? Alot of that question is answered by who do you call if something breaks? If it's a vital machine you might want to go the safe route if you have nobody to call on. If you know or can get somebody to work on the machine that you trust, then the White box is the better value. Most machines never need hardware work in the first couple years. If it fails it'll fail in the first 90 days then run for years without problems normally. Hard drives being the most likely to fail. Unfortunately the WORST hard drive manufacturer bought out the by far best. Seagate the maker of junk hard drives wiped out Western Digital which made unkillable drives :( The IT comunity mourns the loss of Western Digital. I have 12 year old Western Digitals that STILL work! Most WD drives I've bought were retired because they got too small rather than died.
So you want a good back up solution as there is no really reliable hard drive being made any more. Seagate killed both of them (Conner and Western Digital) by buying them out. So be prepared to replace your Hard drive at least once in the first few years. Few drives made today are going to give you more than 3 or 4 years. With Seagates you'll be lucky to get two. I'd recomend using Maxtor or Fujitsu drives. Anything but a Seagate. With Western Digital owned by Seagate now I would not trust Western Digital drives.
As for Ipods, most Operating systems today support Ipod usage. You'll have to install some software. Mac and Windows are supported by Apple by default. With Linux you have to download software but there are lots of it availible to use the Ipod.
Last note, as for the OS choice. You can dual boot and have both until you decide one or the other is just eating up your disk space. To give Linux a spin on your current machine just go to www.knoppix.org and download the ISO. Click on the American flag, the website is in german by default. Anyway download the ISO, burn it as a CD image. Then reboot your machine. You will have a minimal version of Linux that runs purely off your CD. Configure your networking, most likely DHCP if your using broadband and you can surf the web and do everything else you othwise would all without touching anything on your hard drive. Since it's CD based you can't download files or stuff like that. No way to write them to the CD.
Anway hope this helped. Your welcome to email me questions. I tried to cover all the options in detail. Give you an idea of the options availible. What is best depends on your circumstances and budget.
Quick side note.
256 megs of ram is not sufficient for ANY modern OS. 1 Gig is bare minium for current versions of windows. 2 gigs for Vista and plan on using Vista if your going to use windows.
Tech support is a joke with every major computer manufacturer. Warentees cost money today. It's become a major sideline business for computer manufacturers. Fine print details are hard to discern intitially. I would not count on the warentee of any computer manufacturer. It's nice to have. They might even honor it by sending you junker after junker until you just get mad and buy another brand. I've seen it with HP, with Dell with IBM and with Gateway. I personally have zero faith in warentees. At home I own almost all White boxes. I have one Dell. The rest I built myself or had built for me at a local computer shop. I am a system admin by trade and deal with hundreds of computers in my line of work. So I've had the misery of trying to deal with warentees before. It's not been a nice experience with ANY company. Few first level tech support people know anything, even if you can get one that speaks English well enough to understand. 2nd level might know what a computer is. Third level if you can jargon your way up to it is where you might get a real answer. The machines sent to you are refurbished machines that died for somebody else. If your lucky they last until the warrentee dies. On more than one occasion with more than one manufcactuer we went from one lemon to another until the warrentee expired and we just junked the lemon. So there is risk of getting a lemon from name brand manufacturers as well as White boxes. Just a lower risk. If you can find a really good computer shop they actually fix problems and stand by thier warrentees. This is uncommon however. Most of the time they do whatever they can to not spend a dime as thier profit margions are already too slim. I've seen a batch of lemons actually push a local computer company out of the White box market.
any latest computer is enough
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