If the former, I suggest you stick with Dell and buy their 4 year extended warranty and get all your hardware through them.
[...]
Basically, they'll send someone out, replace bad parts. Don't expect them to make your software work or deal with the backups -- just leave you with working hardware. Then, you restore your disaster recovery disc, restore backups, and you are on your way.
Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way because I can assure you that the folks they contract to run the gamut from good to worse that incompetent. I won't bore you with the disaster, other than to say Dell won't win any awards from me.
Nor will anyone. There are a number of factors, but the reality is PCs aren't really built for reliability nor reasonable failure diagnosis.
I'm not saying you didn't have a poor experience with Dell, I'm sure you did. But my point here is the whole affair is going to be rather hit or miss, regardless of who you buy from.
Note, the Best Buy idea noted above is probably OK as well.
4) Instead of using a RAID card, consider a Drobo external storage device:
Got real excited about Drobo a few months back, did my research and discovered a LOT of continuing horror stories of total data loss and zero customer service. When it works as advertised, its' great. When it doesn't you are thoroughly screwed.
While I get what you are saying, make sure you don't COUNT on your RAID-type device to always work. You should always be in a situation where you can get a replacement device and restore backups.
Also note there are hardware failures, but there are also data corruption failures which a RAID-type device won't help with.
Backups are the watch word.
On the topic of backups, note that you should not back up to a single external hard drive. If you have a failure of your primary storage device, all of a sudden, you are one drive failure away from losing everything.
Likewise, don't trust your only backups to the cloud.
Oh, and VERIFY your backups.
Currently looking as unRAID as a possible solution. Similar concept, perhaps better implementation. Could start off by re-purposing my existing computer as an unRAID server. Just started researching it.
Cool, I'll have to take a look at that.
9) Install the absolute minimal amount of software possible.
<g> Easier said than done. I do a lot of different things, many of which require somewhat specialty software. Just the nature of what I do.
If some of this software is simply for test or review purposes, consider getting another copy of Windows (perhaps you already have a now unused copy of XP lying around) and installing it in Virtualbox (it's free, and it's good):
http://www.virtualbox.org/Get it updated and set up, then take a snapshot. You can then install your software, and roll back to the pre-installed state.
-john
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