I bought a Dell I sold my good system, and cracked under the pressure of Tax time looming, tons of work, etc. I grabbed a low end Vostro 200, Intel Pentium DualCore CPU E2180, 1 Gig Ram, DVD Burner, 250 HD, 19" LCD. $399. Figured I'd play with this until I build another. Go ahead kick me I'm ready.

Naw, Dells are a good stable computer. Dude, You got a Dell!

Nothing at all wrong with a Dell. They use good hardware, just have to uninstall some of the crap from the OS and you are good.

Oh yeah I'll be uninstalling tomorrow when it's delivered. I've done quite a few clean ups on Dells.

Does sound like a very nice setup.

IDK im bias towards SONY!

Besides having a Toshiba Tecra, also have a Dell Inspiron 710m.

lol hey now i use a Dell it was a B-present from my family they went the place and asked to have it riged for gameing never botherd to look and see whats inside of it lol

You cheaters..lol

A computer is a computer. Some of us build and some not so much.

Kinda like some of us just know were the ignition is on a car...Then some of us can tear it down and rebuild it.

Exactly. Each person has different needs, wants and budgets. I'm sure a lot of us would like the biggest, baddest, fastest multicore, multi SLI, 8GB RAM setup with RAID 10, 5TB setup with all sorts of whiz bang features and the shebang. Well, reality, common sense and budgetary constraints, home/work life and long term considerations always intrude for most of us. If you have a hard time with replacable blades on a razor, electric equipment has a tendency to fail when you just glance at it, then (more than likely) building boxes ain't for you.
I had never taken a hardware, A+ course in my life, however I was "electronically" inclined. My friend on the other hand took a course that had A+ plus a lot more of hardware/software courses in it and graduated with the Gold medal. He may have passed the course with flying colours however due to "understanding" computers and his "luck" with them, I was the guy that fixed his computers, upgraded his computers and buillt his last several computers for him. I don't consider myself a "great" hardware or OS person but others think I'm pretty good at them. For whatever odd ball reason, I seem to be able to fix, analyze their problems without too much aggro. My buddy, btw, also could just look a box and it would seem to start to act up. LOL. Some people have luck with comps others don't. I am one of the lucky ones.

Burner's right, there are always different needs, in my case, my Pc's are specially for gaming not 'cos I am a gamer and don't anything else, it's 'cos if you want something good, it's a real satisfaction having what we want. so I've tried to get the best hardware I can. If Pc's are only for work office, any Pc would do. I've built my Pc's and am really satisfied with their performance.

My very first comp in '96 was the only one I've ever bought. Since then I've built about 10 for myself with what my budget would allow. I've been happy with the results. The only less than stellar choices I made were a few dodgy Mobos that were returned, a couple of buggy ATI vid cards (returned as well) and a Diamond Monster M300 sound card. That sucker was a real resource hog and had low output volume to boot. Boo hiss.

MBF -Still use a Dell machine, P3 - first I bought several years ago-slow , but still works fine. Since then have a 2.5 Gig Shuttle, and a larger 3 Gig experimental box that I built for testing parts. All work, but use the Dell for my attempts with typing. Next machine may be a small note book, or lab top .... something that will fit under the bed. However, do like the idea of a game machine that Darkness noted-if I get into it-sounds like fun in the future. Like the idea of an integrated media system that I can hook up to fiber optic system now in place too. So, presently just doing the old half a Gig Dell (by the way, would you believe this thing (Dell) actually cost about $3,200 new-all the bells and whishes of that time period!!!) So-good luck to you, and above all have some fun.

Thanks for going easy on me guys. I haven't bought a store bought for myself since 1992. A 486SX-25 from Gateway. For the price of these low end Dells, I just couldn't compete on price. Now I will build another, but I'll have to shop around for the best deals.

i plan on building my owen after i get out of school and have a job atm i dont have enough money to even bother with it

Only Burner would write an essay in reponse to that thread. Wouldnt be my first choice, but if it makes you happy(your money) then it is a good purchase.

By the way danthezooman, your support of the troops is Golden!

Thanks biggie. Coming from you I'll take it as a compliment even though I knew you were trying to tease me. Nice to see you, by the way. Hope everything is well with you and your family.

I agree with BigO..sometimes Burner gets a little long-winded. <ducking> LOL

I don't know what is more crazy...a post from BigO or a long winded post from Burner!

my first comp was in 79 , and if i want a prebuilt it will be a dell

Holy smokes. The Duke of disaster is yakking at me for being long-winded. Bwahahaha. Hey Mike, you still on a personal campaign to break every piece of electronic equipment you've ever owned? I mean we have heard you "bitching" about anything lately so can I assume everything you have is broken or at the repair shop?

I hope you don't plan on flying anytime soon. You might have a "Air Marshall" wanting to inspect you undies........ OOOOOOOOO, what nightmares!!!

which of us build laptops, though?

: crickets :

yeah, me too. I wish we were able to have standardized cabinets, etc, for them.

Wow, and to think everywhere else I get slammed for buying a Dell. I was personally against them from all the BS I heard, after getting my laptop I changed my mind (2004). Sure they make mistakes, but who doesn't? I've fried RAM installing it into my laptop three times now, dell has always sent me replacements (with the appropriate warranty of course).

Dell builds great computers, and now they're standardized to regular components for those who like to upgrade on their own. For those who dont know what to get, dell has a service for it. Their tech support has improved (ALOT), their customer support has always been A+ (at least to me), financing is a great option for those looking to get more up-to-date with technology on a limited budget.

I bought a pretty basic Inspiron 531 (biased toward AMD now, thanks to my very first build from scratch with the Athlon 64 2800+) , ordered 2GB of ram, came with 1GB, they sent another 1GB but it wouldnt fit physically, so they sent me another 2GB and told me to keep the original 1, so now I'm up to 3GB with a kingston 1GB DDR2 stick just in case I build another.

Upgrading was easy, aside from the fact that the power supply ONLY had the mobo connectors and 4 SATA power. no molex, no PCI-E, etc. so upgrading to the 8800GT was a little more of a hassle than I would have liked it to be (and expensive... $440) DVD burner, built in bluetooth (no annoying dongles for me ), if you call in you get more options than online, like I got mine with no monitor because I already had an LCD (plus I was buying an HD), however you dont get the online discounts.

I recommend dell to everyone now. That doesn't mean I'm against builders though, I love piecing together PC's, I will continue doing it. I was thinking about building them for fun and then selling them afterwards. Always wanted to try water cooling

I've got the Dell running pretty good. I had to stop 17 things from starting lol. I also got an low virtual mem error on the first boot. Why Dell would send them out like that doesn't make any sense to me, oh well. Once I killed the startups and installed what I like, Im very happy with it.

Yeah, I've seen rigs that have taken (this is a while ago) almost 4.5 minutes to boot because of all the shit they had loading with the windows boot. Incredible. I have also seen, on comps owned by savvy users, 4, 5 or more instances of a similar program (let's say MP3 ripper) on their machine at the same time. I had to explain that if they wanted to test each program, ONE after the other, fine. But to have that many on the machine at the same time was just begging for trouble. They didn't understand why they couldn't. I had to explain repeatedly to some very smart people why they SHOULDN'T. It was always the same answer in the end: but the "machine" should be able to do it. Not logical, they would say. Reality, I would say. Then we would be off to the races. I didn't mind, they were paying for my time. If they want to argue on their buck, so be it.

dell's are good machines for me. they always have been in the past anyway. sounds like a nice system.

Mandark...where have you been m8?..it's been awhile

how's life?

My buddy is running a Dell. He has had some minor issues but on the whole, it has been pretty good for him. Each machine, chip, ram, company has their strengths and weaknesses. Dell, Gateway, IBM, Lenovo, HP, Compaq. It all depends on how consistent they are and what service they consistently deliver. You can get a "good" bad machine and a "bad" good machine. A lot of people (including me for the most part) find it easy to "lump" together brand performance. There are the "rules" and exceptions to "said" rules.

C'mon Bart get off the fence. lol J/K I feel the same way, I have better luck working on the Dells then the HPs. But thats probably just me.

LOL. Each person has certain experiences in dealing with computers. There are far too many factors to state definitively "this" about a specific brand/model in some cases. One person could get all the shit ones and the next all the good ones. Such is life.