What to buy?

I see the same thing over here, US. The "deals" that might induce me to buy dry up around Christmas (especially retail computer stores), and they are less likely to give you "extras." There are one or two Internet companies that are taking the economic downturn more seriously and are offering better values, but I'm programmed to wait until a month after Christmas for better deals.

Some of the schools flood the market with "off lease" machines around then too.

I think I would hold out for an i7 triple-channel (LGA-1366) with 12G of RAM. Maybe with Win7 64-bit. Should cost $4K* (< $3K if you don't care too much about bleeding edge 3D video performance for CAD applications). I'd go with a bit slower CPU/RAM than the bleeding edge and a really good PSU. Since I'd do a fresh install of everything software, it only makes about 1 hour difference between buying it set up and buying the parts (my little Hitachi electric torque-limited screwdriver makes quick work of building a PC). But it's less stressful to use a clone shop because if anything turns out to be DOA or incompatible, they deal with the return hassles. Newegg is great for a parts source-- I use them all the time.

If performance/$ is more important, maybe an i5 with some AALS hard drives and a decent amount of RAM.

• for the past two decades, the computer I "want" always has cost ~K. Sometimes I get the .5K one, sometimes more the high end, but the top end one is very consistently in that range, +/-20%. Strange.

Well, it's been "vibrating" for more than a month... I suspect noisy bearings.

But it is backed-up ;-) ...Jim Thompson

On everything but the lowest of the low-end machines (e.g., netbooks), it seems like pretty much all the manufacturers install the 64-bit version of Windows 7. (I mean, even 2GHz Celeron laptops are getting 64-bit Win7!) I'm kinda surprised, although I suppose they figure the memory and performance impact is small enough these days that it's better to have the extra "elbow room" that 64-bits gets you...

---Joel

It might be a bit easier if you can define search criteria that yanks everything from "mechanical devices" and "electronic stuff" to then spit it out in the "general use" library, but it's kinda hard to say for certain.

The whole idea of "special folders" that began in Windows 95 makes some sense when a machine has multiple users, but for single-user installations I always figured that just creating directories off the root (e.g., c:\\Documents) was just as good as dealing with a "My Documents" folder that happened to map to c:\\Docs and Settings\\Joel\\My Docs.

In general I believe that the Windows 7 library business will probably be largely ignored by, say, 80% of users, and of the remaining 20% I wouldn't yet want to predict how many will benefit from it vs. finding it far annoying than useful -- I only have one Win7 machine to mess around with and haven't made the time to play with it enough yet.

---Joel

=A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

"I can see Windows 7 from my house..." -Sarah Palin

In message , Joerg writes

I'm writing this message in a virtual XP machine on windows 7, it's really rather good, nice and responsive, seems very reliable so far. Win

Somewhere close to 70 now over 7 years now and I've had very few hardware problems, they've been extremely reliable I've only replaced a couple of PSUs so far.

Yea, but..sometimes the drive dies within 30 seconds after the message...

Given the space between modern hard drive tracks its hard to see how it could vibrate enough to make noise and not have read problems - at least not with a spindle bearing out of whack enough to vibrate the HD case.

I assume you checked the obvious stuff like fans.

I saw a new HP with XP today too, I only noticed it was an HP because it had hosed a perfectly good database due to filesystem issues.

possibly caused by bad ram, dunno, not my problem.

They claim a modest memory footprint but I've read that you need at least 1GB, while XP can quite comfortably run in 128MB. Not that it matters that much these days but typically that relates to speed as well.

The only thing here is that the E and T key lettering has rubbed off on one laptop and it's touch pad now shows a distinct valley. Well, it's got almost 35,000 hours on it ;-)

When I tried to set it up initially, it complained as the machine only had 1GB but for my machine, DDR2 is dirt cheap and I already had another

Ahh, yes, I forgot the keyboards, pretty much all the last lot have had the lettering worn off them now. All the cordless keyboards that were ordered with the last lot have gone in the bin as well but they were Logitech not Dell.

Thats probably a fan or a loose screw in the case causing the case to resonate. Harddrives don't vibrate, they start to make squeeling noises when the bearings wear out after being on for about 10 to 12 years.

Don't bother. Get a new drive, an external drive and download the free version of Macrium Reflect. Makes perfect drive images. That's how I did mine.