bye bye PC hello Mac

[JERRY2KONE]

I have not tried a Mac yet myself, because of the prices. I have had the same desktop PC for over 15 years now and it still does the job for me. I have had issues with it over the years, but repairs are reasonable for the most part. I had one hard drive die on me, but I had a RAID system set up so the second HD was just fine, and the rest were virus issues of one kind or another. If you have a good PC guy to rely on they can fix just about anything. More often then not failures are ususally due to opening up stuff that one should know not to. One of our sons had to use my PC for a school project last week and got a virus from going into U-tube videos. We had taken his laptop, I-touch, and PSP away from him for having two "F" grades. So I let him use mine for an hour or so. I took it into my friends shop and he had it back to me the next day without any problems. It cost me $25 and I have never lost any data. We also have 5 laptops in our family and another desktop that is about 7 years old. Sure we have had issues from time to time, but overall if you take care of your computer needs as far as protection they will last as long as you want them to.

I use Symantic anti virus, and a registry optomizer to keep things clean. As long as you do updates periodically and schedule scans once a week or so everything stays operational. Its really about keeping good habits and staying out of places that everyone knows are full of bad crap that can mess your system up. There are problems with everything at one time or another. I do have to admit that some of the Mac based computers are pretty impressive if you want to pay that much for a PC, but up to now I just could not justiry it.

[Finnster]

Originally Posted by JERRY2KONE

I have not tried a Mac yet myself, because of the prices. I have had the same desktop PC for over 15 years now and it still does the job for me. I have had issues with it over the years, but repairs are reasonable for the most part. I had one hard drive die on me, but I had a RAID system set up so the second HD was just fine, and the rest were virus issues of one kind or another. If you have a good PC guy to rely on they can fix just about anything. More often then not failures are ususally due to opening up stuff that one should know not to. One of our sons had to use my PC for a school project last week and got a virus from going into U-tube videos. We had taken his laptop, I-touch, and PSP away from him for having two "F" grades. So I let him use mine for an hour or so. I took it into my friends shop and he had it back to me the next day without any problems. It cost me $25 and I have never lost any data.

I use Symantic anti virus, and a registry optomizer to keep things clean. As long as you do updates periodically and schedule scans once a week or so everything stays operational. Its really about keeping good habits and staying out of places that everyone knows are full of bad crap that can mess your system up. There are problems with everything at one time or another. I do have to admit that some of the Mac based computers are pretty impressive if you want to pay that much for a PC, but up to now I just could not justiry it.

15yrs?! Jesus Jerry! Btw, I have a '04 Asus PC FS. 1.6mhz, 512mb ram, will run windows7. Exec condit. Classic Taiwanese silicon. They don't make em like this anymore! (actually they do, they just cost more)

[JERRY2KONE]

Originally Posted by Finnster

15yrs?! Jesus Jerry! Btw, I have a '04 Asus PC FS. 1.6mhz, 512mb ram, will run windows7. Exec condit. Classic Taiwanese silicon. They don't make em like this anymore! (actually they do, they just cost more)

Yea what can I say I just hate wasting money on buying something new when I have something that works perfectly fine. Actually I am now looking at moving up to something more state of the art for 2010 because of my job, but I am not willing to spend more than $1000. My 14 year old son has already done his research for updating the desktop I have now in order to make it a gamer for his needs. I think it will be a great way for him to learn a few things along the way. I am not a gamer, but I do love speed and good audio & video preformance. There are a fair amount of pretty savy machines out there in the $600 range. Here is what I am planning for.

A 2.6 to 3.2 Ghz quad core(preferably Intel).
At least 8 Gigs up to 16gigs of Ramm DDR3 would be good.
A fairly good video card (gamer quality is a plus).
A motherboard that has plenty of USB ports and leaves room for expasion
A 5.1 or better sound card.
A mini tower that does not weigh 100lbs loaded up.
A 650W power supply or better.
A teribite of hard drive space.
A desent(fast) DVD burner.

And something that looks up to par style wise. Personally I still like HP because of their customer support and because I can get just about all of this for approx $600 through the base exhange. Most of the electronics we have are HP. We have Dell, Toshiba, Sony, as well, but THeir customer support sucks. I hate propietory crap. The 15 year old PC I use now is a custom built machine that I came up with myself while learning the PC technical side back in 1994. It is a simple Athalon 1.6ghz porcessor. Nothing fancy in todays market, but it was pretty good back in 1994. It still runs along just fine, but something is wrong with the motherboard and only one of the DDR slots is working right now, which really limits my memory speed(1 gig). So yes it is time to move up. Luckily for me I have a few friends to lean on who really know the PC world inside and out. I do my research and call on them for advice, and yes assistance when needed. Still it is not hard to learn new things on your own. I started by buying one of those "Build your own super computer" books and went from there.