BMEWS
 

Oh Swell, It’s a Dell

 
 


Posted by Drew458    United States   on 03/20/2013 at 06:44 PM   
 
  1. Heh ,I knew it would be Dell. There is a reason they are number one in PC sales year after year. Now you will have the power of NASA in your Computer room.And YA, Tom’s is Numero Uno for Smart PC shit.

    Posted by Rich K    United States   03/20/2013  at  07:28 PM  

  2. This is what he bought Gang, with a few changes for flavor:
    http://www.dell.com/us/p/desktops?~ck=mn#!facets=135390~0~13406796&p=1

    Posted by Rich K    United States   03/20/2013  at  07:36 PM  

  3. FYI: I had a lightening strike back in feb which blew out my W Vista machine, so I picked up a new W8 machine.

    It took a day or two to get used to it, and a few more to find some of the more subtle feature turn-off methods (I don’t need all those free “apps”, like facebook, news, sports, weather, etc that were constantly updating on my web connection - so I turned them off), but overall I’m satisfied with it for surfing, writing, spreadsheets, and some PSpice analysis, 3DArchitect, Family Treemaker, etc. HD video is good, too.

    I even popped the case open and shoved my old drive C (it wasn’t damaged) as-is from the blown PC into the internal spare drive location as a second drive (drive E, since D is the backup/restore point drive that came with the thing), hooked it up to the ATA interface, and it ran essentially all my old apps intact from the get-go. I didn’t have to transfer any stuff to the new PC’s drive either. Covenient. No problemo…

    But I still miss Wxp…

    Posted by ooGcM taobmaetS    United States   03/20/2013  at  08:30 PM  

  4. That path isn’t open to me Steamy. This old HD is on an IDE controller. Hmm, maybe it’s an EIDE controller? Dead tech. Not sure that I could even plug it in to power it, much less have a place for the great fat cable.

    Posted by Drew458    United States   03/20/2013  at  11:24 PM  

  5. Actually several folks advised me to just bite the bullet and get onboard Win 8. Guess I’m change resistant in my dotage; Win 7 seems enough like XP that I can handle it, while Win 8 appears to be from outer space. Yeah, I know, I actually already learned how to turn it all off manually, or on boot, and how to rip those parts right out of the install. Or use a $5 workaround. Not my thing.

    Posted by Drew458    United States   03/20/2013  at  11:37 PM  

  6. Rich, wtf kind of link did you paste? The damn thing refuses to finish loading or to even display. Anyway, it’s wrong, and does not point to the machine I ordered. It’s not as if anybody even cares anyway.

    I ran into the same kind of link at hp. I had the damnest time trying to shop their pages; they’d load, give me a 5 second peak, then reload and never complete. I tried it on 3 different browsers, time after time, and then said phooey. Fuggem. Apparently their wonder-pages are too advanced for my piss-poor old machine to even read, forget about render. Hmmm, maybe NOT the smartest idea when writing a shopping page for folks looking to UPGRADE their PCs, hmmm? Like, maybe you’d want to do that page in simple HTML 1.0 or similar? Hmmm? Lost another sale, HP. Brainwaves. DUH.

    Posted by Drew458    United States   03/20/2013  at  11:43 PM  

  7. Sorry Dell,

    I don’t need all those “bells & whistles”.

    I’m stickin with my Commodore Vic-20.

    Posted by New Jersey Yankee    Ireland   03/21/2013  at  12:51 AM  

  8. Probably cheaper Drew to buy a network switch and a couple of Cat 5 cables and connect the new to the old that way. Something like this (I have two of them since they are cheap as chips) http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-TL-SG1005D-Gigabit-Unmanaged-Desktop/dp/B000N99BBC/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1363862882&sr=8-9 assuming of course your old pc has a lan connection?  Good choice on the Dell, you wont be diappointed.

    Posted by LyndonB    United Kingdom   03/21/2013  at  05:49 AM  

  9. After having supported Dell computers (laptop, workstation, and server) I don’t have a fondness for their tech support - but as long as things are working they are good computers.

    On Windows 8, what can I say, it’s the odd windows version - so something royally sucks with it. Myself personally, I don’t like the “Metro” interface on a desktop. It might be OK for a laptop or tablet, but my desktop has a lot of information on it (Rainmeter with 15 info items).

    I’m comfortable using a command line or mouse to do what needs to be done - frankly the tiles in W8 look like a$$.

    Posted by jackal40    United States   03/21/2013  at  08:27 AM  

  10. command line? Gosh, you might go back as far as I do. I remember my reaction to seeing my first mouse and the whole “visual” development arena: my very first reaction was that all this crap was going to get in the way of proper code execution, and that overhead was going to be immense. And it does, and it is! But while I’d love to see a modern PC set up with 64 bit Unix and given some of the old school batch programming jobs to run, just to see how well it churned, visual is the way of the world and what lets normal people who don’t care to understand FPO/s and registers the ability to use computers. And there’s tens of millions of them for every one of us old bit-switch flippers.

    I think I may have purchased this new PC just in the nick of time. This old machine is getting slower and slower by the day. No failures yet, but it’s just fading. I can go through it, and fine tune things once again, but the software just gets slower and slower. Maybe I should turn the thing off, open up the case and vacuum out the dust. That usually helps speed things up. Seriously!

    Posted by Drew458    United States   03/21/2013  at  12:20 PM  

  11. Sadly, I remember the TRS-80, the C64, the Apple IIe/c and the Adam. I learned machine code on the Apple ][e and basic on the TRS-80/C64. Even took a stab at learning Pascal, but didn’t succeed - just couldn’t find a use for it.

    Now, I work in the server and network support arena. MS is going back to the command line with their “core shell” - no gui in windows server is kind of scary after doing so much through a GUI all these years.

    Flip that with configuring Cisco switches and routers. It’s all command line, we even had to find a command shell that would work on windows 7 as well as finding a USB to serial cable adapter to even connect to the devices. Fun times!

    b.t.w. dust is not near as bad as cat hair. After cleaning the 6+ computers in the house, we have two more cats - and occasionally a dog.

    Posted by jackal40    United States   03/21/2013  at  12:33 PM  

  12. I hear you on older systems, Drew. BTW: I meant SATA - I think. the ultra-high-speed serial interface they put on HD’s now with that funny li’l flat connector.

    I miss XP simply because it was the last OS I really “knew” thoroughly. It was also quite stable. I had mine tuned up soooo right for me until the HD blew out back in ‘04 or ‘05 or thereabouts. Never liked Vista, although I got it to more or less do what I wanted.

    Heh. I remember when mouses (mice?) were NEW! When I had to switch to one I consciously made the decision to NOT move it over to my left hand (where I really wanted it being L-handed) because it would handicap me using other folks machines. Glad I made that choice.

    Posted by ooGcM taobmaetS    United States   03/21/2013  at  01:40 PM  

  13. I checked that link and it loaded OK for me. It must be YOU.

    Posted by Rich K    United States   03/21/2013  at  03:17 PM  

  14. It loads in the comment box when I click it so maybe your pasting it to a new window and it wont do that? But it works.
    tongue  tongue  tongue

    Posted by Rich K    United States   03/21/2013  at  03:19 PM  

  15. it IS me. Toldja this thing was going belly up.

    Posted by Drew458    United States   03/21/2013  at  03:30 PM  

  16. The box I am on right now has Windows 8 because HP was pushing the H&LL out of 8 and gave me a big break on the RAID drive system.  In 8 you want to go immediately to the Desktop icon and from there treat it like a beefed up XP Pro.

    In fact thats all 8 is, is XP with a touch screen interface on top!

    No way would I have paid for it!!!!

    Posted by Old Dog    United States   03/21/2013  at  03:52 PM  

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