“Nothing lasts forever!” How many times have I heard that one before? Probably because in many cases its true. But what is one to do about such problems in life. The school demands have increased for my daughter. She is getting assignments that are more complicated and media oriented and her computer is not cutting it any more. I built her computer many years ago and it was sufficient for the basic tasks like homework, research, email, web surfing, music/video playback, but now it need to do authoring!
The Problem:
She shot a great comedy video with my Canon S5IS camera in video mode. The video was uploaded on my computer and moved to the server (I don’t like large files residing on my PC unless it’s in use). We then moved the files to her PC as needed and fired up Windows Movie Maker. No problems so far, so we imported the videos and began to edit some. Chop chop, skip skip, jump jump What! whats going on? I know videos are processor intensive and I could easily see that she was maxing out the CPU just moving the scrubber. Well suffice it to say, after 10 minutes of this the project was abandoned on this system.
So I created a guest account on my PC, (Which doubles as a Media Center PC) and allowed her to work there. No problems, everything went very smoothly, the old AMDx2 3800 processor with 2gigs of ram and windows 7 didn’t even hit 60% of processor usage. I’m sure the 2 10,000RPM Raptor drives helped out a lot as well. It’s clear that she needs a system at least as good as this one.
So now what? The school assignment won’t stop their. She already has had 2 A/V projects due within a relatively short time. I think its time to pass the Media Center PC over to her, then what will I replace it with? The last time these thought entered my mind, I said that I would not build anymore computers. I’ve been building systems since the late 80’s and there is no real advantage in these hard economic times.
Solution:
If I am going to buy a computer I need to get the best bang for my hard earned buck. Well, since I always keep up with the latest tech news, I already had a good idea what direction I was going to go. I want the Intel i7 processor and its new architecture. The first thing I did was to see what the current price’s were for the different models and what the current motherboard and memory requirements are. Wow, many things have changed since my last build! Now, that I have all of the information and reviews, lets see some price comparisons.
- Build = $1,100 with all the stuff I want (minus Blue-Ray)
- eBay = $800 Bare bones (Striped), $1,000 for OK, $1,500 for the good stuff.
New Egg, Best buy, Fry’s and Dell were all around the same prices. Now I feel like a cheep scape, I didn’t want to pay over $1,000 for a PC! How depressing… Wait what’s this? In the corner of Dell’s website is a little tab “Dell Outlet”
After browsing around in there a little while I found a Dell Studio XPS 435MT for $749. Wow over 25% off and with the same warranties as a brand new system would cost. It had everything I needed (But not the toys I wanted, but they can be added latter). So I guess the real question is should I pull the trigger and get the system.
I decided to talk it over with my wife and friends who all seem to agree that the price is a very decent one. But when I went back to the site, the deal was gone! They had some similarly priced units but not with the same options. Seems as if these things move quickly.
I guess my mind is made up, unless I find another great deal allong the way. As soon as another deal comes along from the Dell Outlet that has the options I want, I’m going for it!
Do you think I made the right choice?
