[Earthdog]

Hayashi, If youre looking at buying a new computer I think you will get out if it much cheaper if you built it yourself. I know many people that have bought new Dell computers and were VERY unhappy with them. I know a few who bought them and were happy. Memnoch bought a Dell and seems to be happy with it.

I used to work for Hewlett-Packard building their units. Now HP has merged with Compaq and I used to be a Compaq salesman. Personlly I think they are both CRAP. The HP monster servers are AWESOME. Most people dont have $150,000 to spend on a computer though. Those would be the only HP id be interested in. They have 128 6 gig mirrored hard drives. All that basicly means is that if one of the hard drives fails the ones next to it will still be able to read it. Those 6 gig hard drive are worth $1,000 EACH.

If you want a new computer build it yourself and you'll get EXACTLY what you want/need for about a third or half the price.

HP and Compaq both offer "IMPRESSIVE SOFTWARE PACKAGES"

95% OF THE SOFWARE IS CRAP THAT YOU WILL NEVER USE. I wouldnt want to use HP's cd buring software. I prefer Nero. Its lots better. So why pay for software that you have no use for???? You might get 20 programs but the only one youll use is WINDOWS.

I know someone who bought an HP Pavillion 750. When she couldnt figure out how to get the cd burner to actually burn a disc I went over to check it out and see what was wrong with it. Shed been telling me it kept getting "buffer underrun errors" and the burn would fail.

When I got there I hit control alt delete and found, no BS, 37 processes open and running. 33 of them were programs installed by the Recovery cd. She had added 4 of them on her own. She had only ever used 2 of the ones that came with the software package. I uninstalled about 25 of the programs and changed the preferences on the others so that she only had 7 programs opening on bootup. Then I expalained to her that she needed to conrtol alt delete everything but EXPLORER and SYSTRAY befor she attempted to burn a disk.

She hasnt had a single problem since then.

Buy the parts you want to go in it and build your own computer. Compare the prices for parts with the prices of the pre-built units and you will see (amazingly) how much money you can save.

This is my unit:
AMD 1600+xp
ASUS A7A266-E (supports both SD and DDR RAM)
Pioneer 16x DVD ROM
Panasonic 50x cd rom and Floppy
640 meg of DDR RAM (2x256, 1x128) PC2100 233 mhzFSB
TV Tuner card
Decoder card for the DVD player
scroll mouse, keyboard
Creative Vibra 128 sound card
1300 watt speaker system with sub woofer
17 inch monitor
TNT2 m64 video card (for now, look out Geforce 4 Ti 4600 [img]smile.gif[/img] )
Desk and leather computer chair.

I built this for about $1500 Australian. Call it $750 US.
Comparative systems run NO less than $3100 or about $1500 US. And you wont get the desk and really nice chair in the deal either.

Its far cheaper to buy the parts and even pay someone $50 to assemble it than it is to buy a pre-built unit. If you build it yourself youll laugh your ass off every time you see an advertisement for a unit like yours at twice the price. If you buy a unit that someone else built youll fell like crying when you see who much money you could have saved if you had simply bought the parts and done it yourself.

And dont fall for the WARRANTEE sales routine. Any parts you buy will have at least a years warrantee.

I can build TWO computers for the price of ONE Dell HP or Compaq.

Stay away from Compaq... IMHO they are the absolute worst. Id sell ya one if I was on the clock, but if I werent on the clock Id tell you to get something else.

BUILD BUD.