Please could you read the specs, tell me what you think of this computer

[becca009]

Hi Everyone,

Our technician can build this machine for us for $875 Cdn., (approx. $776 USD) plus taxes.

I need help and opinions please on:

what do you think of this machine. it is needed for small network (6 or so computers). heavy document typing, printing and accessing data bases all day long.

How does this computer compare to one from any office store?

What do you think of the price.

Anything at all you could tell me will be valuable.

We have inefficient, slow computers right now on windows millenium costing a lot in tech support. Can spending $ on a machine like this reduce the need for support, or, simply, what are your overall opinions please.


*****Specs*****

Price includes One year warranty on parts with on-site labor
(no monitor included)

CPU Intel P4 940 – 3.2Ghz LGA775 (Dual Core, 4MB cache)
Motherboard Asus P5LD2-VM DH
RAM Consair or Kingston DDR2-667 1GB dual channel (512MBx2)
Floppy Drive Panasonic 1.44MB
Hard Drive Seagate SATA 80GB x 2 (mirrored) (ie. two hard drives)
DVD LG DVD Burner
Sound Card On board
Video Card On board
Network Card On board
Modem N/A
Speaker N/A
Keyboard A4 keyboard
Mouse Logitech or Microsoft wheel optical mouse
Case Chenbro PC61069 or PC61169 + AcePower 450W power supply

And then in addition we'd purchase:
Software Windows XP Professional Edition OEM $170 Cdn (installed)
MS Office 2003 Basic OEM $205 Cdn (installed)
(Word, Excel, Outlook)

[PCCam]

That should do ok for what you say you will be doing with them. It is overkill acually, 1gb ram, processor. You don't need a floppy drive, those are obsolete. DVD burner could come in handy, but isn't a must.

[becca009]

Thanks for the response PCCam. Maybe another question is in order as well, what specs would suffice if this is too sooped up? In going and looking at computers in the shops, I have no idea what minimum requirements we should be looking at.

Also, do all new computers in the shops come with XP loaded?

[bAdWaYz]

That computer sounds pretty good to me. Is it a little overkill for what you want to do with it? Sure a little but who knows what you might be asking of this computer down the road. When buying or building a new computer part of the overall reason should be to "future proof" things a bit. Dual core is sure half that battle and a gig of RAM is in the near future going to be the min to run Vista "with all the bells and whistles turned on". As for the question are all shop computers loaded with XP the answer is no. You can get custom built computers with no OS at all. You can go with XP or XP pro, Media Center, ect ect its up to you really.

[becca009]

thanks for the input! i had no idea buying a computer for the office would be so difficult. buying for home is easy.

so i've just been searching the large retail stores .... seems everything comes w/ xp media mostly and no microsoft office. so when i search prices for less powered machines and add on $500 for xp professional and office, i'm exceeding our tech's guys quote for this much better machine, with software accounted for.

Another problem, boss really wants to pay in advance insurance for a couple extra years onsite tech support for hardware problems. our tech offers it only free one year, no additional years. He is a small business owner, he can't compete like that.

problems with hardware, don't they usually happen right away if they're going to happen? what are your guys thoughts on that?

obviously parts go here and there, but thats just par for the course IMO