Bought kids a dell now, ME, buy dell or build?

conv3rsion said:
i built computers, then i went mac 3 years ago. I love OS X.

If I was going to buy a computer now, I would buy a pre-built win 7 box. 6 reasons:

1) windows 7 is great. Its faster, easier, and cleaner than vista is. It can run on much weaker hardware (netbooks, nettops), and much better on good hardware.

2) PCs have gotten so ridiculously cheap compared to macs, they are now at least 50% less expensive than macs. Go price out current desktops/laptops. You can get better stuff in a pc for half of whats in a mac. As much as I love OS X, most people probably don't get the same benefits out of it that I do, since they don't need unix commands. I just helped my girlfriend buy a laptop and at the end of the day, as much as I wanted her to have a mac, there was just no way to justify the extra cost.

3) if you get the right vendor you will have a single point of support, instead of one for each part in your build

4) it used to be you had to build in order to a good priced box for gaming, thats not true any more. If you are really into building computers (that is you enjoy it) thats one thing, but if you are just doing it to get costs down, its not nearly as beneficial in that respect as it used to be.

5) Yes you can run windows on a mac but to do so legally means you are going to shell out an extra $100+ for the win license. Without windows, you can't run a lot of apps that seem to take forever to get ported to macs (like google chrome for example). Sometimes its nice to just be able to natively run the apps you want without dual booting, or virtualization and without extra licensing fees

6) the cost to vendors for those windows 7 volume licenses is much less than what you will pay, so if you are going to buy windows 7 for your build, you are already at a disadvantage.

Macs need to get cheaper, you can get good pc laptops for $500-$600 now, and good desktops for the same. An $1100 macbook or $2000 macbook pro doesn't have the value proposition it used to.
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I agree to every point listed above.
I have been testing and choosing tools for different purposes over the last ten years.
I cant just start it over again.
 


sasquatch said:
OK, in years past, I always built my own computers.

Now Dells are getting better but do I buy or build from scratch again?

I will do some slight gaming but mostly programming, surfing web, AM stuff and of course Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

if build, any thoughts on brand of MB, CPU speed.

thanks for any advice
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I have been building PCs for myself and others for many years. I would recommend you build your own: i7 920 CPU, Windows 7 Pro, Asus Mobo, Corsair RAM, ATI HD4800 or HD5900 Series Video Card, ATX Mid-tower case such as Antec 900 or similar. If fan noise is an issue, pick a case with 120mm or larger diameter fans. Newegg is my favorite source but Tiger Direct and ZipZoomFly are also competitive. The PC cheapies at Best Buy are about $300 and the best gaming rigs are $5000+ so you have a lot of wiggle room. By hand picking the components and building a PC yourself, you will know what you have. Assembly line builds are built with corporate profits as a major concern and that rarely results in premium component selection. As to Mac vs Windows, both have their advantages.
 
Apple is going to have exclusivity with the new Intel Core i9 for a while. 6 cores each, so 12 core computer coming.
 
Also, keep in mind that if you buy pre-built you're going to want a clean install of Windows 7. Never bought Dell, but the Gateway and eMachine (OLD) that I've owned both came with so much bullshit pre-installed that half of the memory was being allocated to things I didn't even know were running, and the disks that come with pre-built machines tend to have all the same shit built in. It's pretty hard to get rid of everything, you might have to end up buying a copy of Windows 7 anyways.
 
I say build your own seeing as you've done it before. You have total control, and get exactly what you want. If something breaks down, 9/10 times you can just buy a new one and replace the individual component at low cost.

Also, I don't know crap about macs so can't talk intelligently about them!

HTH
 
I normally would go with build.

I build my own machines since 20 years now, and price-, performance-, and pridewise, it can't be beat.

Starting with a failing mainboard (after 6 months), my current build is giving me soooo much trouble though, that it simply cost me way more in money and nerves than any prebuilt machine.

Finally got that fucker running and still haven't gotten to the BIOS tweaks it needs.

So er...

If ya got the time and are willing to learn, build.

Otherwise - buy.

::emp::
 
Build if you enjoy it, otherwise a Dell is ok. Unless you want to spend 3x as much for the same hardware; in which case you can get a Mac.
 
Search on Bing for Dell, click the cashback link in their ad, and get 20% back from Bing Cashback - I believe the offer ends tomorrow. Decided to order a new computer, since the 20% off made it worth it.
 
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