The Conservative Cave
The Help Desk => Computer Related Discussions & Questions => Topic started by: CG6468 on February 28, 2011, 10:21:09 AM
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I'm getting close to buying a new PC. Do any of you have specific recommendations for or against any brands? This is a Dell, which has performed OK for me, but it's over 6 years old, cannot support WIN7, its RAM is at the limit for upgrades, and the 80G disc just isn't big enough for me any more.
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I am not "techy" but I highly recommend Asus.
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Hell, Thor can build you one. He did for me, and I and Mrs E are very happy with it.
It's not going to be as cheap as you'll find with some of the name brands, but the components will be better and it'll be put together correctly.
And you won't have all that software crap that Dell and Gateway and Compaq choke their machines with. God, that's annoying to have to start deleting all that shit.
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Depends... are you buying a laptop or desktop?
As far as laptops, I've had good luck with Toshiba and some Lenovos (Lenovos have issues with cheap LCD screens but the rest of the system is pretty solid). My general advice for laptop shoppers is to avoid HP no matter how tempting that low price tag migt be.
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Depends... are you buying a laptop or desktop?
As far as laptops, I've had good luck with Toshiba and some Lenovos (Lenovos have issues with cheap LCD screens but the rest of the system is pretty solid). My general advice for laptop shoppers is to avoid HP no matter how tempting that low price tag migt be.
Definitely Toshiba. I have one that's nigh on 13 years old and still running.
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Hell, Thor can build you one. He did for me, and I and Mrs E are very happy with it.
It's not going to be as cheap as you'll find with some of the name brands, but the components will be better and it'll be put together correctly.
And you won't have all that software crap that Dell and Gateway and Compaq choke their machines with. God, that's annoying to have to start deleting all that shit.
I COULD have built y'all one cheaper, but then it wouldn't last as long. I was looking towards the future when I built Mrs. E's.
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I COULD have built y'all one cheaper, but then it wouldn't last as long. I was looking towards the future when I built Mrs. E's.
Yep, this was every bit a custom machine - far better than you'd get by talking to some sales guy at Dell who shoves data down your throat so fast you gag.
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I bought a Compaq at Best Buy back in the late fall. It's a basic one, and came with Windows7 and I bought Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010. I only got the tower, and it came with a keyboard and mouse, and was $309. I kept my old monitor which is a flat screen, and I am using my old cordless mouse that I just bought last spring.
I've been happy with it, though Word 2010 is a test! Also, have had problems sending Word documents to people who aren't able to read the documents. I guess because they are using a much older version of Windows?
I did have to buy a thingamajig to plug into an port, to read my camera disks, because there aren't any slots on the tower...which I didn't notice until after I got it home, set up, and was already using it. It works for 4 different sizes and was less than $15, and was a whole lot less than what a tower with the slots would have cost.
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I'm looking for a desktop machine. I got this one directly from Dell, but I won't do that again. Sam's and other places carry just what I need, but how about brand reliability? The big retailers aren't good at all for repairs.
I've also heard of programs that will directly transfer programs and data from the old machine to the new one. Anyone have any experience with those? Although the programs are what I'm interested in; my data is backed up on a separate hard drive and on my laptop.
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I got my last desktop from Tiger Direct. I paid next to nothing for it, but it was an upgrade for a ten-year-old system that was on its last legs.
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I got my last desktop from Tiger Direct. I paid next to nothing for it, but it was an upgrade for a ten-year-old system that was on its last legs.
I'm afraid of Tiger Direct. I got a scanner from them that never worked properly, and they would not take it back. Their stuff is all rebuilt (refurbished) I believe.
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This is my second Compaq. Last one was bought in early 2005. It was fine until I moved in Sept and switched from DLS to cable. Not enough RAM and I couldn't keep connected into our network.
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I have no problems connecting the Comdast, but after a while it refuses to load any other programs, such as Excel or Word, and then the 'Net freezes up.
So I reboot, and all is well until the next time. This can happen up to 4 times a day.
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I am not "techy" but I highly recommend Asus.
I am. :-)
We sent our daughter off to college with an ASUS notebook - she's thrilled with it and we will probably buy one for the wife soon.
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I am. :-)
We sent our daughter off to college with an ASUS notebook - she's thrilled with it and we will probably buy one for the wife soon.
I have one, the BF has one, and then he got one of those little Eeeeeee! ones, for traveling. He runs Linux, so he is much more particular than me. I just want one that works. :-)
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I have no problems connecting the Comdast, but after a while it refuses to load any other programs, such as Excel or Word, and then the 'Net freezes up.
So I reboot, and all is well until the next time. This can happen up to 4 times a day.
That's sort of like what was happening to me, but then it kept becoming more frequent. It got to the point where it would freeze about every 30-60 minutes.
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I'm afraid of Tiger Direct. I got a scanner from them that never worked properly, and they would not take it back. Their stuff is all rebuilt (refurbished) I believe.
I have bought all kinds of stuff from Tiger, both new and refurbished with no problems. The last thing I had to return was defective RAM (no problem believe it or not they replaced it).
They do sell refurbished but it is listed as such. They also sell stuff off lease (which I would probably never purchase).
Over the years I have had plenty of problems with scanners. Darn if I am not having issues with an HP all in one PFSC that I bought new from BJ's not that long ago. :banghead:
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I have bought all kinds of stuff from Tiger, both new and refurbished with no problems. The last thing I had to return was defective RAM (no problem believe it or not they replaced it).
They do sell refurbished but it is listed as such. They also sell stuff off lease (which I would probably never purchase).
Over the years I have had plenty of problems with scanners. Darn if I am not having issues with an HP all in one PFSC that I bought new from BJ's not that long ago. :banghead:
I have an Epson CX6600 scanner that has not given me one problem. Not one, printing or scanning. I kinda wish I had gotten the Epson all in one (I like Epson products) too, but didn't pull the trigger on that one. It'd hardly ever get used and I couldn't justify the cost difference.
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I've supported scanners and MFP printers/copies for a few years, and you get what you pay for. The cheap $100-300 laser and ink all-in-one printers were the first ones to stop working. The larger 30,000-page MFP printers were more reliable.
The HP 3380 LaserJet is not a bad printer compared to others on the market for the price and the toner is affordable.
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I'd not purchase a retail level compaq/hp computer of any description. I spent too many years supporting them to ever have any faith in them.
If you're committed to getting a name brand machine look at Dell or Toshiba.
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I've supported scanners and MFP printers/copies for a few years, and you get what you pay for. The cheap $100-300 laser and ink all-in-one printers were the first ones to stop working. The larger 30,000-page MFP printers were more reliable.
The HP 3380 LaserJet is not a bad printer compared to others on the market for the price and the toner is affordable.
You know a lot more about this kind of stuff than I'll ever know, but as cheap as laser printers are these days (I absolutely refuse to buy inkjet), I'll buy a printer and it'll last for 4 or 5 years, then I'll give it away.
I also don't fall victim to that bullshit line "You gotta use official, gen-you-wine, can-only-get-'em-here" toner cartridges that are triple what you pay for them elsewhere.
I've got two Canon ImageClass MFP printers (these are b&w) at home, and an HP Laserjet 1600 color printer. They work terrifically -- that is when I can get the #$%^@#!! print server to work. :argh:
But I'm not married to these things. They start messing up, and I start looking for a way to junk 'em out. I remember when laser printers would run big, big money. It isn't that way anymore, thank God.
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I dislike inkjet printers. They're overpriced and if you don't use them regularly, the damn ink will dry out and cause all kinds of problems. The majority of printer needs are going to be black and white and if you can live without color ink, you'll save yourself a lot of money and grief. I get mad when I think of the number of color ink printers, cartridges, and useless gimmicks I've gone through in the last 10+ years.
When I was at Ford, we had 300 printers in one building. Five were color lasers and only one was a color ink plotter They eventually dumped three of the five color lasers (LJ 6550). Color printing is enormously expensive and just not worth it in my opinion.
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Agreed, Chris. I use the color laser fairly sparingly - only for publications (master copies) that are slated for mass photocopying elsewhere. I'm a newsletter editor for an organization I belong to and I need that capability.
Our workhorse printer is the Canon ImageClass MF4270. It's fast, quiet, can print duplex, and relatively cheap, certainly compared to color.
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I'm looking for a desktop machine. I got this one directly from Dell, but I won't do that again. Sam's and other places carry just what I need, but how about brand reliability? The big retailers aren't good at all for repairs.
I've also heard of programs that will directly transfer programs and data from the old machine to the new one. Anyone have any experience with those? Although the programs are what I'm interested in; my data is backed up on a separate hard drive and on my laptop.
It's easy to transfer programs when using the same Operating system (windows XP to windows XP for example) But when migrating to Windows 7 (or Vista) that can be problematic.
Deb, what you need to do is save your document as a word 97-03 type document. If people have 2007 or better, then they can read, edit, etc the .docx format that 2010 saves them in.
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I've supported scanners and MFP printers/copies for a few years, and you get what you pay for. The cheap $100-300 laser and ink all-in-one printers were the first ones to stop working. The larger 30,000-page MFP printers were more reliable.
The HP 3380 LaserJet is not a bad printer compared to others on the market for the price and the toner is affordable.
Any recommendations for a wireless laser multifunction printer??
doc
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Not really. I don't recall any of those printers being able to support wireless.
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Any recommendations for a wireless laser multifunction printer??
doc
You COULD probably get a wireless printer server and use THAT for your network connection for your Laser MFP.
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As a related aside, a friend, who is an accountant, buys Brother laser printers and uses them until the cartridge is done then buys another. Claims it is cheaper than buying toner.
I won't go into the details of my past suffice to say that I have lots of experience supporting high volume printing before and after NMCI.
Everyone wanted color laser printers when NMCI came to the facility. And so they got them. What they failed to realize is that color laser printers used a very expensive wax cartridge system. While the printers were 'free' the ink ended up costing a fortune. Most of the stuff would have been just fine printed on cheaper ink jets. Then there were the Power Point Rangers who felt they needed to make a "complete package" of their slides for every person who might ever see them but always managed to send an unchecked draft version without checking the printer situation first. The draft version usually ate the ink leaving them scrambling to find more for the 'final' corrected version. You can always tell a senior manager, you just can't tell them much.
HP, at the time made the best highspeed lasers for my application. And for those in the high volume business, toner is not the only consideration, coronas can set you back a couple bills on your maintenance budget as well. We tried to use aftermarket toner in recycled cartridges but found it was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe for home use it would be ok. You never knew what you were going to get and after a while the maintenance crew refused to service a printer which had had recycle cartridges. It was a matter of consistency and low bid in our case.
In a production environment you do every thing you can to not have printers go down. Drivers become an issue to support specific applications so you just don't slap another printer on line unless it is identical. It is not all cupcakes and ice cream. When the paper stops the work stops. This is just a fact of life in a manufacturing operation. Someone always wants a "hard copy". You carry a beeper for a reason, 24/7 and come to dread the printer down call.
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Little did I realize that this thread would grow its own life! :lmao:
I'm 99% sure I'll go with a Thor brand machine. I'll look into the stuff he sent me and get back to him this week. I just hate all the manufacturer's crap the companies put on their machines. :banghead: :censored:
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It's easy to transfer programs when using the same Operating system (windows XP to windows XP for example) But when migrating to Windows 7 (or Vista) that can be problematic.
Deb, what you need to do is save your document as a word 97-03 type document. If people have 2007 or better, then they can read, edit, etc the .docx format that 2010 saves them in.
It's a fine point, but I believe that the *.docx file extension first appeared in MS Word 2007. Word 2010 continues to use it. And, as it's been pointed out, for those who haven't downloaded the conversion program from MS, there are problems when somebody who's running MS Word 2003 and earlier versions attempt to open a file with the *.docx extension.
This is from Wiki:
The newer ".docx" extension signifies the Office Open XML international standard for Office documents and is used by Word 2007 for Windows, Word 2008 for the Macintosh, as well as by a growing number of applications from other vendors, including OpenOffice.org Writer, an open source word processing program.[34]
Link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#File_extension)
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Little did I realize that this thread would grow its own life! :lmao:
I'm 99% sure I'll go with a Thor brand machine. I'll look into the stuff he sent me and get back to him this week. I just hate all the manufacturer's crap the companies put on their machines. :banghead: :censored:
The last couple of computers that I purchased, I reformatted and reinstalled the OS first thing. I only installed the things I wanted.
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The last couple of computers that I purchased, I reformatted and reinstalled the OS first thing. I only installed the things I wanted.
When I bought a Toshiba laptop last summer, I found some of the programs that Toshiba loaded to be useful. Most were not. So I merely uninstalled the programs I didn't want and went from there. Having to do all that software loading and configuring is a major PITA. I'm doing it right now for my home machine - my hard drive died, and to add insult to injury, the replacement HD died as well. So I got to do all that twice - not fun.
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When I bought a Toshiba laptop last summer, I found some of the programs that Toshiba loaded to be useful. Most were not. So I merely uninstalled the programs I didn't want and went from there. Having to do all that software loading and configuring is a major PITA. I'm doing it right now for my home machine - my hard drive died, and to add insult to injury, the replacement HD died as well. So I got to do all that twice - not fun.
The worst part of that is the Windows Updates.
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The worst part of that is the Windows Updates.
And Adobe Flash updates. Gawd - that's a daily exercise any more.