Vista PC recommendations? (2 Viewers)

[Parker Clack]

Thanks guys. I had already fingered it out.

Parker

 

[NeilO]

Thanks again. I ordered a Dell XPS 420 and it should arrive late next week. They had a President's Day sale going on and so I bought something with probably more than I really needed, but maybe it will last me longer that way.

Neil

 

[nolesrule]

No matter how much computer you buy, it never lasts long enough.

 

[mylan]

NeilO, Best Buy has a package deal on the XPS 420, 22" monitor, and an Epson printer for $1099. I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on that, I configured the same computer without printer on Dell and it came out cheaper at BB. It is the less expensive 420 with 3G Ram and not much else though.

 

[NeilO]

My new PC just arrived yesterday. I don't know whether it was a better deal than Best Buy's or not, but it is too late now.

 

[KurtEP]

I'm glad someone's having good luck with Vista. I've been running Vista on a Lenovo laptop and have had nothing but trouble with it. Unlike other operating systems I've used in the past, I've haven't been able to really fix some of these permanently. For example, I've disabled the tapping function on the mouse three times now. It occasionally activates itself again for no apparent reason. Sometimes it freezes up and I have to reboot by removing the battery. Out of the box before the huge number of upgrades, it was practically unusable. Also, some function of the computer is filling my hard drive space with unknown and hidden crap for no apparent reason. I've looked around and have found only very arcane fixes to this problem.

Honestly, if I weren't a student, I'd write this one off as a loss and go back to an XP model or switch to Apple (never thought I'd say that). The sad thing is that the computer is otherwise very nice. Unfortunately, I don't have time to spend trying to get my laptop to do what it is supposed to do. I can't even imagine what someone like my father, who is practically helpless with computers, would do with this system. My guess is that the computer would go sailing out the window.

Edit: Unbelievably, tapping just re-enabled itself. Plus, the section dealing with it in the control panel is disabled. ARRRRGH.

 

[Ray Chuang]

Actually, Windows Vista got its bad rap because it requires quite a lot of hardware "oomph" to really get it going. Now that several critical programs run in 64-bit memory mode (especially iTunes 7.6), I would suggest getting a machine with at least an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 8 GB of RAM, at least a 300 GB hard drive and a graphics card that can display the Aero interface decently fast.

It's been said that the "sweet spot" for Windows Vista is about 4 GB of RAM, so 8 GB of RAM should make it run quite fast.