My brother-in-law text me yesterday asking if I could come by his house and take a look at his computer since it was acting up again. I went by his house and both DVD drives had died on his 6 year old Sony Vaio desktop. I convinced him to go to Best Buy and get a new computer. He ended up with a pretty nice Dell Desktop for ~$750 with the following specs:
If you know my history you know that I have not always had the best opinion of Windows Vista but there wasn’t really the choice to get anything else. XP isn’t available anymore and a Mac was just too expensive. Besides, he likes to do some gaming on his computer so a Mac really does not fit the bill for that.
So we got the new Dell home and I unboxed it and got it setup. Out of the box this thing was a tiger. Everything loaded up nice and quick. I was also surprised that their was minimum crapware on the system and I only uninstalled a Dell/eBay application.
Next it was time to install his wireless Linksys card and 6 year old HP printer. Both the Linksys card and the printer installed without having to download any drivers. I was shocked.
From there we setup his 5.1 surround sound speakers which sounded awesome and loaded a couple of games. Games played nice and smooth and looked great on the new 22” Westinghouse LCD Monitor he picked up with it. He may want to upgrade to a better video card down the road as new games come out but he is more then set for the games that he plays right now.
I have to say that I was really impressed with what he got for the price and the performance that it has. It has definitely caused me to have a new respect for PC’s and Windows Vista. Who knows, maybe a Vista machine (or maybe a Windows 7) will be in my not-so-distant future.
ATI, Dell, From the Network, Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista