If you were close by I would. Its really pretty easy, the drive will have a couple cables plugged in and a couple screws holding it together. The hardest part is opening the computer case since there isn't any standard there, some the panel will remove, some there are screws, some the whole case opens in half. The most seasoned it person will sometimes have problems opening a pc they haven't seen before.

Sorry, too many threads on too many forums, after a day or two I can't recall what was said in what page of what thread, the one your looking at is the tinyurl link to the $1100 hp still right, thats the only one I see.

Have you considered the option of haveing one built by a local pc shop, this way any support you need is right there. If you do want name brand there are local shops that will do those too, I used to work for one, we did mostly government but sold to smaller businesses too. Some of those small local companies will donate time and/or parts to organizations such as yours, I did a couple donation jobs myself.

This is an interesting article on the capability of multiple core processor is available here and gives some interesting information on various benchmark testing.

It all depends on the software application and whether the software is capable of multiple threads for quad core support;

Video editing software such as Corel VideoStudio Pro X2;

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/u...mp;tabview=tab0

benefits from Quad Cores having quad core support. A free trial for 30 days might be useful for testing if you intend to edit High Def Video such as 1080i and 720p video and even has Blue Ray writing support for archiving HD video.

Well, it's been about 1.5 weeks since you reported the problem. If you had re-formatted and re-installed you'd be done by now, so what solution did you finally adopt, and how are you getting on?

A

I didn't want to go to Vista either, but I have to admit that my fears were unjustified. As long as you have the power to run it, Vista is as good as any other MS product. (Ha! It's actually better.)

I was also replacing an old Dell, and wanted to avoid the layered crap software that comes packed on every mass-produced machine now (free trials of a dozen things I never wanted).

I bought a refurbished Velocity Micro. It's set up for gaming, but that also gives me the power to handle photos and video. It has 4Gb of RAM and quad processors (2 dual processors running parallel, to be exact) and a smoking video card. It came loaded with Vista 64bit Pro and NOTHING ELSE. It boots in about 12 seconds flat.

$800. $5 shipping. That's with no peripherals, but I had everything else. I did go buy a nice new monitor to take advantage of that video card, though. I got mine through one of the deal-of-the-day sites (1saleaday.com). dodtracker.com is a good place to start, or, as others have said, get a local shop to build you a machine.

The only peripheral for which there was no Vista 64bit driver was my scanner, but that was 10 years old and free, so I was not heartbroken about needing to upgrade. I run a home network with older machines using various versions of Windows OS, and have started to stick my toe into Linux, and so far (six months in) there are no glitches. Don't fear the Vista.

My semi-retired resident geek finally took pity on me and said he'd give it a shot. I dropped it off Tuesday. If he can sort it out by next week, great. Otherwise, I'll probably bite the bullet and buy a new one and have it shipped while I am on the road for a couple weks coming up. Really don't want to do that, but...

FWIW:

If you have to buy a system, settle on the dual core processor. It is worth the performance and your applications can utilize it. Skip the quad-core processor. For RAM, the 32-bit version of Win XP can only take advantage of about 3MB of RAM. The rest will be unused, but there is no harm in having it installed.

Regardless if you buy a system or not, invest in some disk imaging software, like those that have been mentioned earlier. Image your system onto an external hard drive or some DVDs when you get your system back. Or if you buy a new one, image it the first day you get it, install all of the applications, updates and stuff you want and take another disk image. Then maintain some form of regular backups and annual disk images as software changes. That way you can always restore yourself back to a known good state in little time.

Good luck!

Exactly, anyone who works on computer should come up with his own good backup plan. As far as backup software is concerned if your budget is low you can get decent free solutions. But if you don´t like fiddling with too much software and combining it, buy some complete backup/imaging solution, it´s worth it.
In my opinion one of the essential things is to install the system on its own partition or better separate HDD and save all your data to the second HDD/partition. This means that your data will be independent of the system. You can even relocate "my documents" directory to another partition. If anything happens with the system you can restore or reinstall it and your data remain itact.
As far as backup hardware is concerned at least one external HDD for mirroring your data on regular basis is must.

If the "things" are pixels or such across most or all of the screen that points to the video system.

If the "things" are the "Knight Rider" panning blocks XP always displays when booting then it doesn't point to the video system.


If you *did* install a driver for your video system and the second display wasn't seen then that may point to the video system.

If you *didn't* install a video driver then not seeing the second display is reasonable.

Make sure the fans are turning and that there isn't a lot of dust in the computer.

Just keep in mind RAID is not backup. My description is that backup makes sure good data is available somewhere (even if recovery is a nuisance) whereas RAID makes sure your trashed files are always immediately available. Entirely different goals. Arrange good backup first, then worry about RAID after backup is solved.


My MacBook Pro runs faster with an external 1394b disk than the internal disk. Any eSATA connector ought to be as fast with an external disk as any internal disk.


I call this deterioration "barnacles" - Windows updates over Windows patches etc, add-ons like Flash accumulating over time, multiple printer drivers, etc. Any Windows system accumulates barnacles over time which makes it slower as time goes by, causing little failures that grow until it doesn't work at all any more.