Author: Paul Stimpson Date: To: Hampshire LUG Mailing List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] What is the PC to buy ?
Hi Jon,
I'd go with Dell just about any time. I've found them to be well built, consistent and good value. They also buy good, brand name parts and I've never had any huge problem with Linux compatibility.
I currently have a Dimension desktop (still going strong in its 4th year) and a nearly new Precision M6300 "mobile workstation." (Aka a big butch laptop that you wouldn't want to carry around all day but a fantastic performer that is great to carry to work use, carry to the next job and so on.)
Before my current Dell. Owned an Acer Travelmate. It was solid and (other than a dodgy ACPI and DSDT implementation that caused trouble with Ubuntu Edgy and that some of the BIOS settings could only be changed with their Windows control panel) it was fine. It was from the 4000 series (the mid range). One of the guys at work bought a 2000 series (entry level) and it wasn't half as good for build quality.
I would strongly advise you against buying a Sony. I just fixed one for someone. It was poor inside and made from the kind of cheap parts you'd buy at a computer fair. It also had Sony optical drives which are known to be particularly vulnerable to copy protection on bought media (no surprise considering Sony own music and movie studios.) To top this Sony had used an Asus motherboard that was a special variant and all the Windows utilities from the Asus website reported "unsupported model" and refused to install. I would also avoid "store own brand" kit like Advent from PC World. I've not had good experiences of build quality there.
I'd go along with Sean that the most important thing is to decide more or less what you want your new PC to do for the next 3 years before you start shopping. It's all to easy to end up buying something that doesn't meet your needs throughout its lifetime or that is over-specced (and probably overpriced) when surrounded by pages of shiny kit, all of which is better than what you had. For example, I bought my last laptop with general office tasks in mind (there weren't any stunning Linux games back then) but a couple of years later I discovered 3D gaming on Linux and it really struggled.
Good advice a friend gave me was to look at the price/performance graph and get the best performance you can before the price starts rising very fast. Like 10% costs £50, another 10% costs £70, the next 10% costs £200. I usually find that one step behind the latest and greatest is a good place to be.
