Dude, I have had my dell forever and it's still pretty superfly. I opted for the 500 watt dell sound system back in the day and it still sounds pretty good.

I think I will go alienware next time, but will keep the dell as a backup.

 

Our HP was a POS. We had problems with it almost from day one and the hard drive crashed when it was a little over a year old. I hated that thing. You may have good luck with yours, I hope you do, but with the experience I had, I'll never own another one.

 

I bought a new Latitude D620 a few months ago. Love it.

 

My first computer I ever bought was a P1 166MhZ with a 14.4 baud modem, 16MB of RAM, 1GB HDD, 15" CRT, Mustek Scanner, and an HP DeskJet 670c. The whole setup cost me $1950 and this was back in 1997. Now that I build my own computers, I will never go back to Dell, HP, Gateway, etc...

I built my current system, which is now outdated for like $340 total. It's a P4 2.66ghz, 512MB RAM, 240GB HDD, 128MB video card. Congrats on the Dell though. For the pre-built PC's, they're one of the best.

 

Yea I'd always built my own too....

But.......
Now with the price of parts + software (I've lost the Serial for my Genuine windows XP Pro Disc) So now they want me to buy another copy..... F THAT!

But yea I can't build anything close to this system and software for less than $1000.....

The parts alone would be the close to the same as this system.....

Computers are now a disposable item.... buy it use it a few years and throw them away because it's not worth trying to upgrade, you can buy all new cheaper than you can upgrade.

 

Ckecked the tracking this mornin... it is on the truck coming for delivery, should be here by 5' oclock tonight at the latest....... Happy Birthday to me!!!!!

Desk is cleared off and old system is tore down.

 

Building your own system is a nice novelty nowadays but its kind of a waste.

Sure you have ultimate control but you ultimate headaches too. Multiple vendors to deal with for warranty claims, shipping, etc.

In the end you really don't save much money, don't get much more performance, and its a lot more work.

I've been down that road and won't go there again ain't worth the trouble.

 

Wife just called, they delivered it to her, (had it delivered to her wokr becasue she is there all day everyday...) so now going to go get it.... and spend teh rest of teh day setting it up, configuring it and installing software......

 

I had my dell for 2yrs this month and it was flawless until a month ago when my 160GB sata harddrive crashed.Dell sent me a new 250 gb under warrenty but now i have to find someone to do data recovery because all my info is gone. Basically pics of my daughter from the day she was born in Jan 06..My lazy *** never backed it up. Also with a dell if you get a printer thru them, you can only get the ink thru dell. Dell even has a was to lock out foreign print cartridges if you buy them online refurbished (sp?). My printer locked out my black ink last week and the printer only had 1yr warrenty. Now i cant get it to work for shizit

 

What exactly did the HD do?

If it will spin and the bios sees it I might beable to help get those photos... i had teh same problem a few months ago.

 

I ended up with the "blue screen of death" and nothing happened at all. I brought it to microcenter (comp store) and they said i will need professional data recovery. A friend of mine does all kinds of freelance computer work in NYC and he looked at it and said he can see the folders but cannot open them. He recommended a place called on-track but i cant seem to get this done for under $500....

 

Be very careful how you fix it and what utilities you run on it. A company like drivesavers can probably get most of you stuff back but it will be expensive.

If you are going to try and run utilties on it make an image of the drive in its current state first and work off of the image. DO NOT WORK OFF OF THE ORIGINAL DRIVE if you have any hopes of getting your data.

 

If you can get your friend or yourself to make an image of the drive with something like ghost, you can restore the image to a working drive and use some linux based utilities (like Knoppix) to mount the drive outside of windows and attempt the recovery.

 

I think i need professional data recovery. I know nothing about how to image or copy this drive. It is sitting in a box next to me right now and the old lady gives me grief constantly to get the pics...

 

I know what you meanabout teh grief... when I htought I'd lost mine my wife cried ofr 2 days over it while I was frantically trying to recover them.......

I accidentlaly deleted the partition they were on though....

If you want I'll find teh software I used to recover it, cost me $50 to doanlaod.... they have a sample you can download and see if it can find teh files... then if it does buy it and retrieve them.......

Just install the drive as a slave on any machine and make double sure not to write to it. Run the program nad bam all should be there. It will ask you to save them on the other drive somewhere..... it even keeps the original file names..... then once you've got them saved you can format your drive and use it again..........