Where to buy a new computer.

[bowtieguy]

Where should we make our purchase? Looking for a desktop and touchscreen monitor. This typing on the phone is getting old.

[TripleDigitRide]

TigerDirect.com, Newegg.com, Best Buy...

[Dustbuster]

consumer depot in Nashville has a bunch of refurbished stuff,tiger direct has always done me well,and weve built towers w stuff from tiger direct and amazon w no problems.

[runco]

Study study what you want, then create a matrix of what is out there, your budget, and then make it happen.  I myself have been partial to Dell.  In the future, I may have to try my hand at the Apple desktops since I now have 2 IPADs, 2 IPODS, and one IPhone.  3 years ago, did not own any apple. 

[RC3]

Depends on what want out of it. If you want performance, building your own is cheaper. If you want something nice and simple, the above stores mentioned have killer deals on their newsletters.

[bowtieguy]

I looked at tiger direct as they had a similar Asus to what we saw at best buy (but cheaper). Then I noticed the specs were slightly different. I just don't want to end up with sub par components thinking I'm getting a good deal.

[bowtieguy]

As far as specifics, I'm thinking if I can get an i5 processor with 8gigs of ram and a terabyte or two HD (for under 600) I'll be pretty set for the next couple years. From what I've found, I should stay away from an and equivalent processor because the graphics are integrated on an amd and the touchscreen monitors need a pretty strong graphics card.

I think I'm over thinking this. Edited February 4, 2014 by bowtieguy

[seez52]

I don't know if they have touch screen models but I've been buying Dell refurbs off their eBay site and the prices are hard to beat. They are shipped from Mt. Juliet Tn. Edited February 4, 2014 by seez52

[Westwindmike]

I've always had good luck with NewEgg.

[Spiffy]

For a tower model, spec it out and built if from Tiger Direct. For a laptop/notebook, Dell with the extra warranty. I ran my M600 for almost 4 years straight before it started to have fans fail and over heat.

[Nynick81]

I have to agree with several above, Dell for laptops is the way I'd go. All the things they can cram in a laptop I see no reason to ever own another desktop.

[zeke4351]

Go Apple if you can afford it. Not having to deal with all the crashes and bugs that are so common with Windows is well worth the extra money in my opinion. I have never heard of a virus on a Mac. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[bowtieguy]

As far as laptops are concerned, we've decided to buy a small notebook computer for when we travel, but keep all of our data at the house. Besides, when spending a lot of time on spreadsheets I just find a full sized desktop monitor and keyboard more comfortable. We had a dell laptop for several years and after three hard drives crashing (totaling about $2000 in data recovery), we've given up using a laptop for everything. Better to diversify.

All of our computers to date have been PCs and we have android phones. Although macs look good from a design and build quality standpoint, their inability to upgrade or sub out components just isn't appealing to me. Same thing with the newer all in one desktops.

[Metalhead]

Go Apple if you can afford it. Not having to deal with all the crashes and bugs that are so common with Windows is well worth the extra money in my opinion. I have never heard of a virus on a Mac. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

What crashes and bugs? I'm not trolling, I'm just curious. I cant think of a single crash or bug I've run into in the past couple versions of Windows that I've used (7, 8.1).

Edited February 4, 2014 by Metalhead

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I don't have any more crashes/bugs on winders than on mac. I mainly use the mac nowadays for little other than web browsing and mail, but the mail is my main storage of mail, years and years of mail. I also have pc mail stores, but the mac is the comprehensive store.

My 8 core mac pro 2.8 GHz sometimes seem painfully slow. On the other hand the 4 core 3.4 GHz pc is sometimes frustrating as well.

A couple of weeks ago, somehow the permissions on my mac pro had set themselves so I couldn't create folders at the root of the drive. So I went to the get info dialog, unlocked the disk permissions, entered my password and set the permissions of root to system and also me. So that would have been fine, but something I do all the time on PC, I clicked the box to set same broader permissions for all the contents of the folders.

After about two hour of churning setting permissions (root drive is a 2 tb raid 1 about half full). It complained it couldn't use a lot of kexts in system any more, with the BROADER permissions. So I ran drive utility and told it to fix permissions, and a few hours later it claimed success, so I rebooted and it wouldn't boot.

So I booted it off an external firewire backup drive, and had to finally wipe the boot drive, after spending a couple of hours poking thru the boot drive and making copies of anything that might have changed since the last full backup a couple months ago. Especially all the mail houscleaning I did a few weeks ago.

So then I selected my december full backup and it said the backup has to be verified before restore. It spent most of the day verifying the restore, than spent most of another day actually doing the restore.

Then a few more days updating the new system restore and backing it up to other disks in the mac pro. So then I was deleting a bunch of temp files in the external backup drive, a few thousand files. On empty trash, it ran a few hours and I noticed the process was apparently hung. So I tried quitting the empty trash process, and it wouldn't quit. So I tried rebooting but it wouldnt let me reboot or even relaunch the finder because it was busy emptying the trash.

So I finally powered it down to get out of it, and after reboot the external backup drive was unreadable, so lucky I'd copied it off several locations. So then had to reformat the external and backup again to the external. Grrrr.

I had the boot drive copied to several internal drives, so decided to do the free latest osx 10.9.1 (from 10.6.8) and that worked ok, but half my old programs are incompatible with 10.9.1, even including the drivers for my tascam audio interface. So I installed latest drivers for a "test case" m-audio interface that had been sitting on the shelf, and got it running good enough for youtube video playback anyway.

So far the 10.9.1 doesn't seem noticeably faster or more elegant than 10.6.1, especially considering that so many older programs no longer run anyway. But I can boot from 10.6.8 on another drive if necessary.

So thats my latest wonderful experience with the computer for the rest of us. :) Edited February 4, 2014 by Lester Weevils

[tnguy]

Note that you can usually plug a full-sized monitor an keyboard into a laptop, even without a dock.

 

Touchscreen monitors don't require anything special in the graphics card department, that's an input function. Any video, onboard or not will be able to run most monitors a regular consumer will consider buying. Where you are needing to pay attention to that is if you have high framerate requirements such as for gaming.

 

For most people, I'd suggest going for a laptop these days, it's just got so much upside and you can get the performance most users desire at a decent price. One downside is that the batteries need replacing more often than I'd like. I'd skip Compaqs and Toshibas as I've had bad luck with those. I like the Thinkpads and I've used Dell Latitudes and had good luck with them.

[tnguy]

Go Apple if you can afford it. Not having to deal with all the crashes and bugs that are so common with Windows is well worth the extra money in my opinion. I have never heard of a virus on a Mac. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Cool. Now I get to spoil that for you ;)

 

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/widespread-computer-virus-indicates-mac-users-no-longer-safe/

[DaveTN]

Where to buy a new computer.

Dell on-line

You don’t sound like you want to build one anyway, but I quit building my own years ago. You can’t build a good one for what you can buy a Dell for.

[tnguy]

I still do my own. Mostly because I like to be able to upgrade the individual bits and pieces. I'm still using a case I bought in 2000 in order to hold all the bits I brought over from England when I came. I'm arguably using a 16 year old computer :D

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Edited February 4, 2014 by tnguy

[Jonnin]

Where should we make our purchase? Looking for a desktop and touchscreen monitor. This typing on the phone is getting old.

 

This is like asking us where to buy a new car by asking "hey, i need a car, where can I get one" --- and no other requirements or desires given. 

 

You want a generic PC to get on the internet, get a cheap pre-built PC and buy the monitor separate.   If it needs to do more than this (games?  computation?  play movies?  Interface to something ? other?)  we need more info.  You can, by the way, hook up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to a tablet PC for the web, pretty cheap, or a cheap laptop.   But it wont do much more than surf the web...  

 

 

you do not need anything special for a touch screen actually.  They really are a monitor/mouse and specialty mouse driver ....  that is all it is.   The screen senses your touch, and sends it like a mouse command to the existing interface of the OS that was made for mouse clicks.    Ultra high resolution is actually BAD because your finger is large and running in 8000X120000 resolution with buttons the size of a pinhead makes it hard to click what you want.   A large screen, with a medium resolution and possibly OS settings for larger controls is much easier to use, IMHO, but regardless, you don't need extra good graphics for it.  A lot of touch devices (not computers but control screens for hardware)   run in ancient resolutions like 640x480 with a modest (5 inch squareish) screen. 

Edited February 4, 2014 by Jonnin

[Jonnin]

What crashes and bugs? I'm not trolling, I'm just curious. I cant think of a single crash or bug I've run into in the past couple versions of Windows that I've used (7, 8.1).

 

Every crash I have had in windows excluding the now ancient screwball versions (95, for example)  were from running bad software, period (some of it, my own mistakes in development).  A bad driver, or a bad program can still bring windows down.   The same can be done to a mac or unix machines ... a guy here took down a big unix machine by running a binary for a different CPU, it oblitered the OS to the point of format and restore.   You can bork up anything if you are creative enough.

Edited February 4, 2014 by Jonnin

[Metalhead]

That's kinda where I'm going with that. I cant think of any crash or glitch that was due exclusively to the OS, and not bad programming of individual software programs. I'm beginning to think the whole "Windows crashes all the time and bugs blah blah" stuff is more just repeating the same thing you've heard since the Window's 95 days and no real experience with modern Windows OS's in the majority of cases where I hear it. I'm sure it happens, but I don't believe it's any more widespread than getting a quality firearm from a reputable manufacturer that develops an issue - to make a gun analogy.

[RC3]

Better yet, what do you want out of your pc and what is your max budget?

[bowtieguy]

Like I had said previously, it's really just going to be used in the bonus room for everyday tasks. Web browsing, maybe my son will do some gaming, my wife can get some work done (mostly spreadsheets). Mostly just media and light gaming. Of course that may all change as my son gets older, but that's also why I want to stay with a tower and an up to date processor. Think Springfield and not Wilson, Colt not Noveske, .308 and not .338, Corvette (c6 of course) and not Ferrari. Trying to avoid planned obsolescence, and get the most bang for my 5-600 bucks. I know the monitor will be about 300 so call it under a grand out the door.

 

I think I have a good handle on what I'm going to get for that money, but just didn't know if there was any place other than the Best Box stores to buy a new computer. I didn't know so many people ordered from Tiger Direct, I was just a little leary of them since I haven't ever done business with them.

[hardknox00001]

I don't have any more crashes/bugs on winders than on mac. I mainly use the mac nowadays for little other than web browsing and mail, but the mail is my main storage of mail, years and years of mail. I also have pc mail stores, but the mac is the comprehensive store.

My 8 core mac pro 2.8 GHz sometimes seem painfully slow. On the other hand the 4 core 3.4 GHz pc is sometimes frustrating as well.

A couple of weeks ago, somehow the permissions on my mac pro had set themselves so I couldn't create folders at the root of the drive. So I went to the get info dialog, unlocked the disk permissions, entered my password and set the permissions of root to system and also me. So that would have been fine, but something I do all the time on PC, I clicked the box to set same broader permissions for all the contents of the folders.

After about two hour of churning setting permissions (root drive is a 2 tb raid 1 about half full). It complained it couldn't use a lot of kexts in system any more, with the BROADER permissions. So I ran drive utility and told it to fix permissions, and a few hours later it claimed success, so I rebooted and it wouldn't boot.

So I booted it off an external firewire backup drive, and had to finally wipe the boot drive, after spending a couple of hours poking thru the boot drive and making copies of anything that might have changed since the last full backup a couple months ago. Especially all the mail houscleaning I did a few weeks ago.

So then I selected my december full backup and it said the backup has to be verified before restore. It spent most of the day verifying the restore, than spent most of another day actually doing the restore.

Then a few more days updating the new system restore and backing it up to other disks in the mac pro. So then I was deleting a bunch of temp files in the external backup drive, a few thousand files. On empty trash, it ran a few hours and I noticed the process was apparently hung. So I tried quitting the empty trash process, and it wouldn't quit. So I tried rebooting but it wouldnt let me reboot or even relaunch the finder because it was busy emptying the trash.

So I finally powered it down to get out of it, and after reboot the external backup drive was unreadable, so lucky I'd copied it off several locations. So then had to reformat the external and backup again to the external. Grrrr.

I had the boot drive copied to several internal drives, so decided to do the free latest osx 10.9.1 (from 10.6.8) and that worked ok, but half my old programs are incompatible with 10.9.1, even including the drivers for my tascam audio interface. So I installed latest drivers for a "test case" m-audio interface that had been sitting on the shelf, and got it running good enough for youtube video playback anyway.

So far the 10.9.1 doesn't seem noticeably faster or more elegant than 10.6.1, especially considering that so many older programs no longer run anyway. But I can boot from 10.6.8 on another drive if necessary.

So thats my latest wonderful experience with the computer for the rest of us. :)

 

Wut?

 

Eyes glazing over.........pondering ceiling colors............

 

:dunno:  :)

Edited February 4, 2014 by hardknox00001