Help....Need Info

[GammaBoy]

Hey I am in a predicament, I have a younger brother who is going back to college and I am buying him a PC. I know I can probably build him one, but we are in a time frame and I guess he wants something with a name brand. Well he need to do papers, some reports, and of course burn cds. Any suggestions??? Thanks

[Budfred]

There are of course a multitude of choices. What are you looking at for price range. For the kind of things he needs, you could get by with a system for under $500, but if you want to get him a power system you will need more $$. For cheap brand names I would check out HP or Compaq from one of the big stores (Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City). If obscure and less well rated brand names are ok, go with Emachines. If he wants top line (and you can afford it), there is always Dell or Sony, maybe even Gateway. The main problem today is a plethora of choice.

Good luck,
Budfred

[GammaBoy]

My old man is no rockafellar but , He is the first in my family to go to college and money is not really an issue. Basically we are looking for Dell, Sony , we already have a Gateway but nowadays we are paying for name and not product. What are some of the things as far as hard drive,or processor should I be looking for, memory as well?

[Budfred]

"My old man is no rockafellar but , He is the first in my family to go to college and money is not really an issue. Basically we are looking for Dell, Sony , we already have a Gateway but nowadays we are paying for name and not product. What are some of the things as far as
hard drive,or processor should I be looking for, memory as well?"


I'd look for lots of RAM, at least 512Meg. DDR is slightly faster than SDRAM, but it may not be worth the extra bucks, particularly if you plan to upgrade later. Hard drive probably needs to be at least 60Gig and more if he is going to try to download a lot of music and stuff. This is a fairly cheap enhancement, so you may want to go as high as you can find. Also, get the 7200 RPM unless they have something faster that I haven't heard about yet. If you are going for power, Intel claims to have a 3Gig Mhz chip coming out, but it may be too late to get one for your brother in the time frame.

AMD or Intel are about equal in quality, but AMD is faster at the same Mhz and pretty much always cheaper. They just announced another price cut in some of their faster chips. If he is a gamer, you need a hot video card, but I don't know enough about that to advise you. I would definitely urge going with a flat panel monitor, at least 17 inches if you can afford it. I use an Envision 17" which is cheaper than most and it is great. I also have a 15" Envision and it has almost as much screen size as a 17" conventional monitor.

There are so many variables to look at, I can't tell you what I think would be best. If you were willing to spend $5000, you could build one really hot system, but there would be something hotter out next week for less. You might want to simplify the whole thing and go for a laptop if your brother can handle holding onto it (they tend to get stolen a lot). For school, a laptop can be real handy. That is a whole other discussion though.

Good luck,
Budfred

[Mark Miller]

I bought one for my son, and it was an HP. Any of the name brands are good for school. Can get a great system for under $1000. When he is through with school he can buy a hot machine
Regards Mark

[iisbob]

You can find just about any type of system nowadays in places as common as Wal-mart; but i wouldn't be so concerned about hardware as i would be Support, and from personal experiance from a business standpoint, and if you look at the nationally rated service/support reports, Dell is the way to go for a retail system.

They've never failed us yet on our notebook's, and they know we are technically proficient so they know when we call in it's not some BS reason and they have never failed to accomodate us yet.

[jabarnutcase]

I agree with iisbob

Unless you build your own, Dell is the way to go. Consistently rated high in support- Which is a very important thing to consider with a computer as we all know! :)
I know people with Dell's that love em- And I've seen some amazing deals lately on TV (If you can tolerate the irritating "Dell dude") :D

Be worth checking out their site! (http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/series_dimen_desktops.htm)
Good luck!