On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 06:55:09PM -0400, Mark C wrote: > Yep - I'm looking at a new machine. Stopped by Best Buy but was unimpressed > so I asked a local computer shop for a quote barebones new machine. I can > pull my data drive and relatively new video card out of this box and use > them in the new one. I could use the system drive form this one but would > like to upgrade to a SSD. I'll see what they come up with.
I'd suggest taking a look at what <your manufacturer of choice> offers on their website. I gave up going full custom getting on for two decades ago; I found that after investing multiple hours of my time I was saving at best a small amount of money (and, generally, getting a worse warranty). The worst thing about the systems is getting rid of the extra crap that gets installed on the system (HP PC dock, I'm looking at you ...), and nowadays you can get rid of most of that if you are careful (and there are various products that can get rid of it for you if something escapes your notice). Go for a system with an SSD and only the on-board graphics, and you won't be paying extra for things you don't want. Adding an additional data drive and a graphics card is about as easy as hardware upgrades can be. Admittedly I haven't bought a desktop/deskside system for quite some time; I've been using notebook computers for work, and we're just about to replace the long-in-the-tooth notebook computer my wife uses for various purposes, the most important of which is to run all the household accounting software. Her old system is a 4GB HP-dv7t (bought mainly because it could be configured with two hard drives, so she could snapshot all the financial data onto the other hard drive every time she exited from the program). Nowadays 4GB isn't really enough to run Windows 7 Pro, and when I looked at adding more memory I got a nasty shock - DDR2 memory sticks are expensive! I could get over 16GB of DDR3 RAM for what it would cost me to buy an additional 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and I might have to buy all-new RAM to be able to upgrade that system to 8GB. While I couldn't find a reasonably-priced system with two hard drives, I did find one with a 1TB hard drive plus a 256GB SSD. With a dual-core i7 processor (quite a bit faster than a 2.5G Core 2 Duo ... :-), 16GB of RAM, Windows 10, and an SSD boot drive, I expect she'll find it significantly faster. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
