Polly promised. Prolonged patience proves prosperous. I persevered and penny pinching Polly is permitting a purchase of a new “PUTER”, positively propitious!
Mrs Sn-man has finally approved a capital expense for a new computer. I am so jazzed!
I little polling to see if there are any comments on what is currently out on the market. Windows 98 vs ME, Dell, Gateway, HP.? Let me know your thoughts.
Hits enter while whistling Zippity do da, zippity aye, my, oh my, what a wonderful day!
If you’re going to buy one from a major vendor buy a Dell. I have a Gateway, and it’s great…and the service has been fantastic, but they seem to be slipping a bit since I got my computer. Dell’s have been top-notch for the last 5 years and show no sign of getting worse. Just don’t buy a Compaq or Acer. They use substandard components, and the tech support is usually useless. There are 3 companies I would buy a computer from now: Dell, Gateway, and Quantex. That’s it. My Gateway is my last store purchased PC though…I’m building all my own from here on out.
Jman
I would recomend building your own or getting one custom made at a small, generic computer store. Major brands are over priced and use junky propriatary components in many cases. Whatever you do, don’t get a compaq. I wouldnt recomend gateway either. The major brands that seem pretty good are micron and dell.
Dell desktops are good. Dell laptops, however, pretty much suck. My company has an exclusive contract with Dell for PCs, and everyone I know (5 people, including me) that has a new (less than 1 year) Dell laptop has lots of problems with them. My boss gets BTOD several timesa day, I had to have my motherboard replaced out of the box becaues it ran too hot. I also had to have my docking station replaced because it wouldn’t reliably give me a network connection,
I’ve been happy with my IBM Aptiva, not so happy with Windows 98 SE. My Gateway workstation in the office has been 100% trouble free running Windows NT. Acer I can say sucks.
That said, my next machine will definately be built from scratch, is cheaper and more reliable. You also get stuck with a bunch of useless crap software that does more harm to the OS than good with the prefab boxes. If you aren’t up to builting it yourself, I second the recommendation to visit a local computer store and have it built for you. Its still cheaper and they’ll likely be happy to explain alot of it to you, and hold your hand towards doing it yourself in the future. Also you wont have to deal with hotlines and Knowledge Bases for support, you’ll have a guy with a name to call.
Look into building your own.
We currently have an old Gateway (166), but have not heard good things about them recently. I probably should look into putting one together. I have not done that since… well it was an 8088 with a Tiger motherboard running at 12 MHz and a 10 meg hard drive, at the time it was really fast. I just have not stayed current with what’s out there and works well together. So I am a little leery. The small shop idea could fly, I check with some locals. MC, if we go the brand name route, I will check with a friend who uses AOL. Thanks all.
Does anyone out there have personal experience with Windows ME? I use 95 at home, NT at work, and have not heard great things about 98. Operating systems?
I love my Dell at home. Had some minor problems which they promptly took care of. Included replacing the mother board. Service has been tremendous and the computer has been nearly trouble free. Not sure what caused the motherboard problem but I do know they rectified it as soon as we figured out the problem. Was on hold for awhile to get a person though.
As an owner of a Dell laptop who knows others who also own them, I will state that I disagree 100% with this opinion. I wouldn’t give up my Inspiron for anything.
That said, having supported 200 Thinkpad 600/600Es in a corporate environment, and going to a school where 90% of my class owns Thinkpad 600Es, I would NEVER reccomend a Thinkpad to anyone.
Forgot to mention. I would reccomend you go with Windows2000. It has all the functionality of Windows98, with all the stability of NT4. Stay away from windowsME. It’s junk. If you must use a 95 style OS, go with 98 or 98SE.
What exactly do you use your computer for? Bussiness, games, web surfing?
If you have any technical skills you should build your own. As for brand name I can’t recomend any brand for I have no experience with them. If you are just going to do bussiness and web surfing I would go with and AMD Duron processor and 128 MB of RAM. If you are going to gaming I would get an AMD Athalon with 256 MB of RAM. I would not get an Intel processor because they are way over priced. As for an OS, if you are going to use any old software then I would stay away from Win2000. Window ME is buggy. Win 98SE is stable and supports the most programs. If you are real adventurous then try Linux.
My thoughts exactly…except it looks like Quantex is either in the process of, or will be filing Chapter 11. This grieves me to no end (being an owner of 2 Quantex desktops and 1 laptop). I really hope they can pull themselves out of the quagmire because my machines have been very reliable. And their technical support has been heads and shoulders over everyone else.
I’ll advise on the OS first…Windows ME seems to be geared more toward the media aspect of home computing, although the system restore is a very nice feature. I recently upgraded to ME from Windows 98, and I’ve seen a drastic improvement in performance. I only had one piece of very old software quit working–well, it was time to replace it anyway! But if you’re not planning to get a monster hard drive or load the system with RAM, I would stick with Windows 98 SE. Though I see all of the bad press surrounding ME as totally undeserved, I don’t know how a slower system would handle it.
Now for desktops. Gateway has basically gone downhill since they dropped the “2000” from their name. Their support for older (well, from 1995-1996) PCs seems to have dwindled to nothing. I’ve got a Dell right now, and I love it! I did have to have the modem (56K US Robotics) replaced after a few months, but they were very helpful–it was replaced in less than four days.
Mac G5 with OSX
Vroom.
Dell and HP have good products, but I much prefer HP support, and pricing is competitive. For home PCs you can get one with monitor for under $1,000, some even less, but watch out for shitty configs with little RAM and weak CPUs. Go for PIII 733 or faster (most will offer a Gigahertz soon), and like others have said, if you tailpr it to your needs you’ll be happier later. Try to get a config which will work for you for the next two years, wothout pricy ungrades. Also, if you plan to use it a lot, get a good monitor. (LCD panels are great but very expensive still).
Have fun whatever you get.
I have nothing positive to add, but felt obligated to mention that my brother had a Compaq, which crapped out fairly quickly, and Compaq then put him through customer service hell for the better part of a year, until CompUSA replaced the whole damned thing for him themselves. I have sworn a blood oath to never buy a Compaq product as a result of this. Just spreadin’ the word. 
Computers are a lot easier to put together these days. Almost no jumpers to set, plug & play PCI cards. Usually you can just plug everything in and install windows.
Macs all the way!
Compaq is attempting to once more go the way of proprietary hardware in their systems. I do hope that they get burned worse this time than last time (I.e. actually go bankrupt this time.)
Gateway I will never forgive for what they did to the Amiga. Also, they use nonstandard components as well, just try replacing that powersupply with a better one, it won’t fit. So if your system has high power need, TS.
Dell I won’t comment on, never owned one.
Macs I also won’t comment on, since I programmed them for three years I have a very nasty set of memories regarding them.