Wide World of Women

Im interested in surfing the net with a broadband connection & recordin TV shows and burning them to DVD.....Im ALSO interested mainly in reliability and longevity as well.....WHATS the best computer brand for this? the nearest store has sony, HP, and emachines...Im also considering a dell....any better than these? whats your reccommendation? THANKS!....BTW, my budget is $600-$1600...

Emachines are worthless. There's a reason they're cheap. I've never had a good experience with Dells. I would suggest Toshiba.

I have had great experience with Dells. Got a tower and a laptop from them and I use a Dell at work. Can't complain. The only problems had been if Windows did some kind of hiccup. Dell will allow you to chose what you want in the computer at their website.

For what you want to do, make sure you get the biggest Hard Drive you can afford. Processor speed doesn't have to be the fastest. You can save money by going with a slightly slower processor instead of paying big bucks for the top of the line. The difference will be minimal.

get as much RAM as possible, you can always increase ram but that will increase the speed of your machine for internet use and pic loading

THANKS for the info guys....and I want more guys giving their opinions as well..

I was looking at a HP media center machine today ($900)...it has a 250GB hard drive ...BUT the recording doesnt allow you to choose bitrates & resolution!....its just got 4 preset "speeds" like stand alone recorders....(at least thats what the sales guy showed me and I doubt he knew more about them than me......he couldnt answer half my questions...this was at office depot)

Ive heard gateway computers were crap and consumer reports LOVES apple computers but these dont seem really built for video and they cant have lots of stuff added to them..

if you're wanting to do video then I would seriously go with a toshiba, thats what they are built for is media stuff. Apples or crapples are good for photo editing and graphics. HP is decent and is all around good but nothing special in one area. Gateways are worthless in my opinion.

I had an HP for a long time, but I had A LOT of issues with it. I'm not familiar with Toshiba's so I can't comment. I own a Dell now, and think it's the best pc I've ever had. The great thing about buying a Dell is all the customization. Go to there website and play around with different setups and compare the costs. Yoda mentioned get a lot of RAM which is absulutely necessary, but also make sure you have plenty of hard drive space if you're going to record video . They even offer hd's that have 500GB of space! Great for storing lots of video. Get 1GB of RAM if not more and as much hd space as you think is necessary for your purposes.

Also, for burning dvds get the Sonic software I think it's called MyDVD or something like that. This program lets you make menus with visual backgrounds and background music you pick. You can import files from almost anywhere (as long as it's not copyrighted....and not that I would do it, but there's plenty of software out there to "back up" copyrighted and encrypted material).

As for recording directly from TV, I'm not sure but, check into the Windows XP Media Center and all it has to offer.

It all depends on how much money you're willing to dish out, but even the most expensive setup goes for just over $2K. Do you remember what they were offering for that just 5 years ago? Whatever you do make sure check the details of every component, ask lots of questions, and tell them what you expect from your purchase.

Good luck.

This is what I'm getting ready to buy
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8125697033

i have had good luck with hp and dell
e-m's are like the ugos of computers

i don't like recording on my hd .it slows my comuter down and takes up boo-koos of space

some friends have had bad cs with dell but i never use it

THANKS for the info guys....it will be 3-6 months before I get a PC so Ill have time to look and study, Im going to check out the dell site and see what price I can get...but on QVC the dell's are very high priced compared to HP and even sony...

I just looked at the dell site and the ones Id be interested in are $800-$1600....the $800 one doesnt have a warentee though....the higher ones have 1-2 year in home warentees..

what I like about the PC's is you can add hard drives to them & they can be hooked up to broadband. the hard drives Ive seen are $69-$169 for a 160-250GB ....very heap.

Just build your own PC. Its easy,cheap and you can always upgrade it any time. Go to www.newegg.com thats where my brother bought his parts to build his PC.

I had a Gateway for 4 years or so, never a problem with it.

Got a Dell and had 2 hard drives go bad. The 2 they sent out were wrong. I have 2 250 GBs of Raid 0, they sent out 2 80 GBs. They told me over the phone that it's a way to change 80 GBs to 250GBs, yea, right. Then a tech told me that a RadeO is the same as a Raid 1, yea, right again. But when it was all over with, it came out to 5 new hard drives, then I had to change 2 of them to make them into a Raid O all within 6 months

I could go on about how bad the techs are, but it would take to long. One of them that came out to the house, well lets just say he didn't like Dell and said they are a greedy company.

My best friends wife works for Goddard (runs computers & goes all over the country) and she also does stuff for the Navy and Nasa. My friend told me she doesn't like Dells that she wished she knew I was going to be getting a new one, so she could have got me something better.

My brothers son, has a Dell, 5 months after having it, it went up. 4 times, the techs that came to his house ordered the wrong parts or didn't know what was wrong with it. The techs on the phone sent the wrong stuff also. He works down the ocean, so it has been sitting for 3 months, but before he left, it was down close to 2 months

With that said I have the Dell 8400
Pentium 4 Processor with HT 3.60 GHz 800 FSB
the memory is 2 GB duel channel ddr2 at 533MHz (2x1GB)
Hard Drive- 500GB proformance raid O (2x250GB sata HDDs)
Dual Drives48x CD-rw Drive + 16x DVD+/- with dbl layer write campability
It has 7 or 8 USB ports (don't feel like crawing under the table to look)
Its a Media Center 2005 and Pro XP with a Dual TV Tuner & remote.
There is more , but to lazy to type

Over all, it's a very good computer. It's fast, very quiet. I can record TV (DirecTV) play a DVD and download or get caps at the same time and have other things going on, and with the Hyper Threading, it does not slow down or lock up.

If it were not for the techs and the hard drives, I would say get a Dell. But for me, my next one will be a Gateway again

THANKS for the input slowpoke & others. on the reliability issue the consumers reports showed that out of their questionaire to 60,000+ computer users 12% of apple users had breakdowns/serious problems with their PC's.....gateway had a 24% figure and HP 18% and all others in the 14%-21% failure/breakdown. what this means is that 76% of gateway users never had a problem. I believe the main thing here is to get a PC from a store close by that does repairs reguardless of the brand!.....thats my big drawback from getting a dell, I want a real store close by that I can go too and talk to people in person. the closest store to me is office depot and they sell mainly HP,sony, and emachines.....the next nearest store is best buy and circuit city at 18 miles away. so it looks like Ill be getting either a sony, HP, or emachine around christmas or a little earlier......more input welcome!...

While in college 4 of my friends had a Gateway and I was always putting in new hardware b/c it would go out.

My Dad's company uses all Dells and there's about 25 computers plus a couple of servers. I think I've replaced 15 Hare Drives in 2 years. Their tech people suck too. They tell you whatever you want to hear to get you off that phone. They assume the person on the other end knows nothing about computers and that they can fool the person.

Emachines. . .I still say don't go there.

Sony, I've heard mixed reviews. One of my friends had one and it was always messed up but she wasn't to tech savvy

Dell was using Maxtor hard drives until a few months ago. From what the tech that came to the house said, was that maxtors was going up all over, he said he was replacing 3 a week. So with all these HDs going up Dell went with western digital and stopped using maxtors

He was telling me that 1 lady had a new computer (he didn't say what brand & I didn't ask) and she already had (I believe) 5 hard drives go up, all maxtors. When he called her to make sure she was going to be home, she told him if he was bringing out a maxtor, don't even bother comming out with it

And you are right about the techs, you can't understand them most of the time and when you tell them to that you can't understand them, they say it must be the phone. This tech said he hate dealing with the Dell techs altogether, that alot of people were upset about them

Here is something Western Digital sent me after I e-mailed them to ask what raid I had so when I called Dell that the HDs still were not right, I could tell them what the people that makes the HDs told me. Good thing I e-mailed, Dell didn't understand about Raid 0 & Raid 1, said they are both the same

Dell should show this to thier techs, atlease 2 of the techs I talked to
This came from the site below

RAID 0
RAID 0 uses a technique called data striping to store data on more than one hard drive and increase performance in your computer. Multiple hard drives are combined to make one large volume. RAID 0 can read and write faster than a non-RAID configuration, since it splits the data and accesses both hard drives at the same time. RAID 0 does not provide any fault tolerance. If one drive in the array goes bad, all the data in the array will be lost. A RAID 0 array requires at least two hard drives.

RAID 1
RAID 1 mirrors or duplicates the content of one drive onto another drive. Mirroring two hard drives provides fault tolerance and immediate access to your data if one drive fails. RAID 1 requires at least two hard drives and must consist of an even number of drives.

This came from the site below

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... td_alp.php

James, do you know if you have a mom & pop type independent computer shop nearby? Just ask around and make sure they have good customer feedback.
They probably can set you up with a custom job and provide tech support for near the same price and better service.
If you buy a name brand like Dell or HP they use custom motherboards and other parts that make it near impossible to replace or upgrade parts without dealing with them and their much higher prices for parts & labor.
I would consider getting 2 smaller hard drives rather than 1 large one. It might be a bit more expensive but if you ever have a HD start to go bad, it is better to loose only half, than all. Also you might be able to transfer from one and save from the one going bad to the other before it completely goes bad.
I wouldn't worry about if the drive is Maxtor or Western Digital. I have 10+ Maxtor drives and several Western Digital drives also and have never had a problem with any of them. It is just a crap shoot as to if you get a bad drive. Manufactures buy in large bulk so if they get a bad batch it is going to be more noticeable. But all manufacturers have problems from time to time.

THANKS for the added info guys. another question....which hard drive is best.....seagate, western digital, or maxtor?

malone42, the tech that came here and one on the phone said that maxtor is in very bad shape, that it might go under.

and he also said that he would not get a maxtor, that over the last 6 months, they have gone down hill to fast for him. That he is seeing to much going wrong with brand new HDs from them. This guy also said that he has even replaced alot that are less then a week old

But I guess it is with everything else, you get a good one and nothing goes wrong, get a bad one and hope the new one is good.

as far as getting 2 small HDs, its ok if you don't want to lose anything and you are not recording much if anything. But with me, I have the media center 2005. It doesn't matter that I lost everything, cus what I lost, I could put right back on. The reason for 2-250 GBs and having them on Raid 0 is that it gives me about 140 hours of recording directv on the best recording and more then that with each recording at other settings after I have everything hooked up (scanner, printer, camera, Nortons, dsl,some games and some other stuff) Also with 2-250 Gbs with the Raid 0, that gives me about 466 GBs of capacity were the Raid 1 only gave me about 233 capacity, And the Raid 0 is faster then Raid 1.

When they sent me the 2-80GBs (which they took back) and after I hooked everything up and just did a little recording, I was down to about 30 to 40% of free space. Were as with the 2-250s, with everything hooked up and say about 7 hours of recording, I'm around 90% of free space

I guess it depends on what you are going to use your computer for what size you get

Our county government uses all Dells and they rock. I also have a systemax at home that works very very well. Get as much RAM as you can -- I'd say 1GB. and get the karegest hard drive you can as recording TV shows takes up a lot of space.

My brother had an HP desktop that he said wasn't worth spending $10 on it was crap from the start and HPS customer service sucks. But one of our local fire cief has one of their laptop and says it works fine. Also in regards to e-machines I have not found one person who had one that wishes they had bought it.........

I'd give Dell a second chance/look. Our government has over 50 Dells and only the schools uses Apple iMacs and EMacs in their labs because that is what the state tells them to use, ever other computer even the ones they use for police dispatch are Dells. Most of the Dells have 512MB if Ram and Window XP. But I was lucky and got one that has 1GB of ram which helsp when editing large photo files.

As for burning DVDs I use Nero at work to burn pictures to DVDs. It works very well.

davetv13