Alright.

Honestly, my next PC will be a retail box.

I've built many, many boxes over the years and I'm sick of it actually. After this thing dies, I'll buy my next one, and just upgrade the video card, sound card and install my version of winders.

 

To answer your question, simply b/c I've been working in IT for over 8 years now (not to step on anyone else's feet). Vista is cool to go with. Like with anything new, their will be issues that will need to be fixed and will get fixed. The problem that I find with Vista users is that they buy these computers at the very low prices looking for a deal, which means that the RAM (memory) is low, but Vista is very resource dependable and alot of RAM is needed. So with all that said, If you like, shoot for Vista but at least have 2GB of Ram installed and I think you should be ok. XP is great simply b/c alot of bugs have been fixed.

 

Better yet, just order what you want and open the box and plug it in!

 

I've been running Vista Ultimate since August and I love it... haven't had a problem with it.

 

dell is the best IMO, cept for their customer service, unless they get so confused you get 2 $2000 tvs for the price of 1, but thats not important now. Id love to get an XPS laptop, cept the gaming ones start at $3000 LOL. Like i said id love to get a dell gaming rig, but i couldnt afford the big price. I went n bought an asus barebones kit for $200, it has a pentium D duo core 2.8 ghz, then $70 for 2 512mb sticks of ram, already had an nvidia geforce 6800XT, got a 22'' widescreen dell LCD ultrasharp for i think around $300 (best monitor ive ever seen) and a 232 gig hard drive which i think was around $50 maybe. so that comes out to $200+$70+$300+$50= $620. Not bad for a pretty damn good PC. Got XP but have vista inspirat plugin. Makes everything look like vista, sound like vista, but runs like XP. will be upgrading to an nvidia geforce xfx 8800GT next month, so thatll bring the total to $820. Sounds like a good deal to me.. Dell is great, but if you want to have a pretty good pc for gaming it will probably be cheaper to start with a barebones kit, but what youre looking for dell and others would be perfect and easy.

 

I got a Gen5 Dell XPS, 3.4ghz Extreme P4 2gb ram Gefore 6800 256mb for $600 on ebay!

 

I've been in the business for over 10 years and have built dozens of custom PC's. The reason I recommended the Inspiron 530 is I've had one apart and am satisfied with the component quality. I happen to be very **** about quality, I refuse to build with substandard components to meet a price point. I just built 2 budget boxes for my grandkids for Xmas, simply because I wanted to do it. I did NOT save money, I could have ordered 530's on coupon deals and SAVED money on each one - and had machines that I feel would be just as good as my builds.

There are VERY few major brand prebuilts that I'm comfortable with, but certain Dells do meet my high standards. HP, in my opinion, builds junk, except for the models that use Asus motherboards. However, HP, along with Gateway, eMachines, etc. have a nasty habit of using Bestec power supplies which are total garbage, when they go bad they frequently take the motherboard out with them.

I also won't touch AMD-based computers with a 10 foot pole. It's not the processor, it's the supporting motherboard chipsets I have issues with. I am only comfortable with Intel processors on Intel-chipset based boards. Until the 900 series chipsets, I used a lot of Intel-branded boards, but they went downhill. Currently the only boards I'll build with are Asus boards with Intel chipsets. Intel-based Dells (except for the high end SLI models) use Foxconn-built boards with Intel chipsets, they seem to be quite stable and reliable.

If you want to build a computer, I can suggest components for you, these days I buy almost exclusively from Newegg.com, they consistently beat the prices I get from trade distributors and give me a lot more choices. If you want to go with a prebuilt, my recommendation for the Inspiron 530 stands, I do recommend XP over Vista at this time, and if you are going to do any CAD on it, get the optional video card to take the rendering load off the system and release the shared memory back to the system.