Premade computers

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Original post by Witchcraven I am wondering what a good brand of premade pcs is these days? I am looking for my aunt, who doesnt need a ton of performance. I think the primary criteria would be reliability, lack of annoying preinstalled software, and ease of course. Apple is not an option.

goodluck!...

but as for price, dell is pretty good for non-performance pc's.

I don’t think you can’t get any better that Dell or of course for a good computer that you be proud of with good parts,
Witchcraven Computer, Inc

I'll give a third vote to Dell. My family's bought 2 computer from Dell, I have many friends who have bought from Dell, and our church has bought a few also.

In my experience Hardware problems are extremely rare with Dell, and the support's not bad. And the prices aren't bad either. =P (By the time you add a bearable amount of RAM, a decent sized monitor, speakers, etc, you should be able to get a very decent computer for about $800 or less)

HP is eating Dell's lunch in terms of price -- they're shipping AMD64 and have competent tech support.

I just bought a new Mac about an hour ago, so you can see where I sit on that issue. [wink]

HP/Compaq have very good tech support I've found, and other than one screw up with my computer accidently being sent on a trip all across Canada, they worked hard to meet all deadlines they were set.

Their call centers seem to be staffed with people that have atleast half a clue as to what they're doing.

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Original post by Witchcraven I am wondering what a good brand of premade pcs is these days? I am looking for my aunt, who doesnt need a ton of performance. I think the primary criteria would be reliability, lack of annoying preinstalled software, and ease of course. Apple is not an option.

Never going to happen.

I'll toss in a vote fo HP. I used to own an HP laptop(sold it to a firend) it's about 2 or 3 years old now and still runing fine. Nothing is broken and it goes through a lot of abuse at its new home, unfortunately. My dad also owns a Compaq laptop that has been going on strong for 4 years with no problems.

One more for hp. From my point of view, the good cases (easy to rip apart and upgrade) is a major plus point. They, naturally, come with a lot of rubbish (free internet offers et al) but you can just use the Windows CD (or construct your own from the i386 folder) to install a fresh copy of Windows on them. My old hp P1 Vectra (>10 years?) is still going strong, and my current Pavilion (3 years) has been faultless (though both have been upgraded over the years).

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Original post by Antisheep I'll give a third vote to Dell. My family's bought 2 computer from Dell, I have many friends who have bought from Dell, and our church has bought a few also. In my experience Hardware problems are extremely rare with Dell, and the support's not bad. And the prices aren't bad either. =P (By the time you add a bearable amount of RAM, a decent sized monitor, speakers, etc, you should be able to get a very decent computer for about $800 or less)

Dell has hardware problems left and right. It's the nature of mass production. At work, we almost always have to replace a bad PSU (and when I say always, I mean about once or twice a week). They go out quite frequently. We've also been shipped systems DOA.

I wouldn't call that exactly rare ;)

If your aunt is just surfing the web, reading e-mail, and looking at digital pictures, I would get an E-machines.

They are insanely cheap, and the average person won't be able to tell a difference between a budget PC and a performance machine.

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Original post by Andrew Russell Quote: Original post by Witchcraven I am wondering what a good brand of premade pcs is these days? I am looking for my aunt, who doesnt need a ton of performance. I think the primary criteria would be reliability, lack of annoying preinstalled software, and ease of course. Apple is not an option. Never going to happen.

I got a new Dell Precision 380 when I started this job and it had practicaly no junk compared to others I have seen (Gateway, eMachines). I think all I had to uninstall as yahoo toolbar and powerdvd.

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Original post by tstrimp I got a new Dell Precision 380 when I started this job and it had practicaly no junk compared to others I have seen (Gateway, eMachines). I think all I had to uninstall as yahoo toolbar and powerdvd.

That's an expensive motherfucking workstation (we have them for CAD/CAM work; I'm using an Optiplex GX620). No wonder it won't have BonziBuddy on it.

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Original post by ChurchSkiz If your aunt is just surfing the web, reading e-mail, and looking at digital pictures, I would get an E-machines.

*Shudders*

I have a roommate who got an e-Machine (mind you, it was refurbished) and it has been the worst hunk of junk I have ever seen. Within a week or so the powersupply went, there was no PCI-express OR AGP slot, the DVD drive stopped working, the sound stopped working, and to top it all off the system restore CDs that they gave him didn't work.

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Original post by Moe Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz If your aunt is just surfing the web, reading e-mail, and looking at digital pictures, I would get an E-machines. *Shudders* I have a roommate who got an e-Machine (mind you, it was refurbished) and it has been the worst hunk of junk I have ever seen. Within a week or so the powersupply went, there was no PCI-express OR AGP slot, the DVD drive stopped working, the sound stopped working, and to top it all off the system restore CDs that they gave him didn't work.

I've always bought them for the technology impaired and rarely had problems with them (in comparison to other Dells and HP's). Yes they have no PCI-E or AGP slot generally but 90% of the population doesn't know what that is and will never use it anyway. It's important when buying a computer to know the user, and if she is just surfing the web, checking e-mail, and looking at pictures (like I said), they are great buys.

Your experience also wasn't typical.

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Original post by Antisheep In my experience Hardware problems are extremely rare with Dell, and the support's not bad.

Hehe, for a second there I thought you were kidding me. My friend's Dell's mobo f*cked itself up 2 times in a week, until she finally had it replaced with a more reliable one.

As for cheap, go with HP. There was an offer for an AMD X2 4200+ with 2GB memory somewhere for ~700$, so I would think something much less powerful, but capable for internet browsing and stuff would be really cheap.

(But I figured out it's weakness, it had an integrated video chip which was pretty slow...)

I'd have to vote AGAINST Dell. I've got one sitting next to me and it's the most annoying computer I've ever used.

It's a Pentium 4 3.2GHz with 1GB of RAM, freshly formatted a month ago, and yet somehow the damned thing manages to be even slower than my home AthlonXP 1.4GHz w/512MB of RAM.


I'm pretty sure the P4 3.2 can kick my Athlons ass, but the problem here is that Dell decided they'd be "clever" and use one fan for the entire freaking system. The fan is at the back of the case and automatically spins itself up whenever the CPU gets hot, which, unfortunately, is about 80% of the day. It's LOUD, I can't even hear my headphones at a decent volume when the fan is pumping.

And the worst part: the motherboard throttles the CPU down to 10% speed when it overheats; and unfortunately, since it's always overheating (even when the air conditioning is on), that means it's always throttled down, and going slower than molasses.


Two thumbs down for Dell.

Mith: By chance is it a Dimension 4700? I have one at home and find it to be a very good machine, but I know what you mean about the throttling. I found a simple solution around this:

Because there are only two fans in the case (one blowing out of the power supply and one sucking in just below that to blow over the processor), things get pretty warm. What was happening in my case was that I had the back of the tower pushed up close to the wall, as close as I could get it without bending any cables too badly. The power supply fan was blowing hot air out which was getting sucked back in by the case/cpu duct fan. This made things heat up quite quickly. What I ended up doing was making a cardboard duct that blows the hot air from the PSU out and over the top of the case. You can sortof see it in this pic:

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Original post by Moe Mith: By chance is it a Dimension 4700? I have one at home and find it to be a very good machine, but I know what you mean about the throttling. I found a simple solution around this: Because there are only two fans in the case (one blowing out of the power supply and one sucking in just below that to blow over the processor), things get pretty warm. What was happening in my case was that I had the back of the tower pushed up close to the wall, as close as I could get it without bending any cables too badly. The power supply fan was blowing hot air out which was getting sucked back in by the case/cpu duct fan. This made things heat up quite quickly. What I ended up doing was making a cardboard duct that blows the hot air from the PSU out and over the top of the case. You can sortof see it in this pic:

Sounds like a common fool mistake. It is sad how few people have the common sense to work out how airflow works. Once at a lan party this guy with a brandnew 'kickass computer' was wondering why he was having problems. No thermal paste on his heatsink, and something like 8 or 10 fans, one on every opening on his box, all pointing INWARDS,... "But if they are all pointing towards the processor they'll take more heat out of it!" which isn't a bad thought, except if you put a highpressure thing of dead air over your processor it just heats up.

however, computers are actually poorly designed as far as airflow goes, so many deadzones in them. And who was it that invented that lovely thing, the ribbion cable. Isn't a bad deal for 1-4 wires, but more than that and you're really killing airflow.

No it's an Optiplex GX270; only one fan, and it's locked into my cube here at work, so I can't really do anything about it.