The subject line says it all. I’m in the market for a new PC in England. Lowest price isn’t the object; I can order from the US for that. Why am I buying here? Warranty. Should the thing break, I don’t want to have to ship it back for who knows how long for repairs. To give an idea of some of its features, the computer must run at least 2 screens and have at least 4 eSATA ports and Windows 7. Obviously I’m not going to get this at Tesco. I’m sure someone will have a better recommendation than PC World and Curry’s. Oh God, I hope so.
Please no recommendations for do-it-yourself or Mac. I’ve done both and have no interest to do so again.
I am not PC buff but I just went to Dell and ordered online. UK website so UK comsumer protection.
Did a bit of online research first as to what spec would meet my needs but have to say it, so far, is doing what it said on the tin flawlessly.
Helped to have a geek help me with set up though I have to say, there are many things I was advised to switch off or not allow to install if I wanted the thing to run faster than a snail.
Not a home server, Quartz, but photo editing. I use external drives as storage. I keep 2 drives online and use 2 for periodic backups stored offsite. It’ll be great to just plug the backups in as needed. They have Firewire 800, USB 2.0, and eSATA ports. The dual-screen setup will be quite handy. The iMac currently has 2 displays but I can’t colormatch them. I’ll order a pair of identical displays in hopes that they can be made close in color calibration.
Thanks for the tip on the eSATA add-in card. I can’t believe so few PC’s come with even 1 eSATA port. I may be visiting an HP dealer soon.
You’ll laugh at my reason for getting the machine now. I think I’m the only person who’s admitting that Windows 7 is prompting this purchase. Once the machines start shipping with Win7 installed, I’m jumping.
I got my laptop off Dabs, was a reasonable delivery time and I got what I wanted.
You might have an easier time getting exactly what you want ordering online, at least you don’t have to drive out and then find it out of stock when you get there, I know money isn’t the object to you but it’s always nice to get a bargain too.
You’re going for 64 bit Windows 7, right? For someone like you, I can’t fault it. Graphics demands gobs and gobs of memory.
Umm… you do know to get monitors with 10+ bit colours, don’t you? And a professional graphics card, rather than a gamer one. Or are you sticking with CRTs?
No room for CRT’s here. The screens I hope, in addition to the massive bits, will be LED backlit. It’s going to be fun finding them. You know, I hadn’t thought about the 32 vs 64 bit Windows; I just assumed I’d get the 64. This is the 21st Century you know.
My iMac has 2GB RAM. What’s “gobs and gobs of memory” nowadays? I’d hate to be talking to the dealer, puffing out my chest to order a whopping 3GB only to find out that everyone’s nan has 4GB. As you can tell, I haven’t spec’d a computer in a while.
Gobs & gobs = 8 GB +. The current price / performance point is 2 GB DIMMs, so you’ll be having 8 or 12 GB, depending upon whether you go for DDR2 or DDR3. 64 bit photo-editing software will really appreciate the extra memory if you have large files or lots of files open (1GB+ data). And modelling apps will really appreciate it too. It means that data can be kept in memory rather than paged out to disk.
A Dell Precision (or the HP equivalent) with a Quaddro FX1800 card (or the ATI equivalent) will serve you well.
OK, that’s a big help, both the RAM and video card recommendations. To speed things further, I plan to replace the hard drive with an SSD for faster boot/program load times. It’s going to be fun times here in the windmill for a few weeks.
Photoshop Elements with no more than 4 10 megapixel images open at time, web browsing (Opera), media playing (VideoLAN), and very occasional light office productivity (OpenOffice). That’s about it. I’ll be using whatever they call Windows Explorer for file management. No games, no video editing, no 3d rendering, no Autocad.
Jeebus. I’ve prescribed total overkill. I’d assumed that with your mentioning colour-matching matching monitors and SSDs, you were heavily into Photoshop, 3D Studio, et al. And PS Elements is 32 bit (for now), so more than 4 GB RAM will not help.
A 10 MP image will be 30 MB at 8 bpp. Newer cameras allow more colour depth, so say 16 bpp for 60 MB. Times 4 for 240 MB. Plus overhead. Be generous and call it 300 MB. Double that for caches, clipboards, etc for 600 MB. You only need 2 GB total, though I’d still go for 4 GB or 6 GB. The graphics card is also overkill: though it will serve you well and give you good colour reproduction, but many lesser - and cheaper - cards will do the job quite handily.
Yeah, Quartz, all I do is editing photos. I’ll probably get the greater RAM because you never know. I may jump up to full Photoshop but still do the same things with the addition of actions (or whatever they call 'em) on batches of image files. The almost 2 year old iMac still has plenty of horsepower for my needs, but, as I alluded to in the link in the OP, I’m just sick of it.
Thanks everyone for your help, especially you, Quartz.