Buy or Build a New Computer

[Chris Reynolds]

FWIW.
I'm on my first DELL (an 8400) and its been fine and seems OK on expandability. Its been nice that its just worked, spending all day mucking about with PCs limits my desire to do it at night too.

The comments on Office based DELLS are true of their kit that's aimed at offices where there's never much of a need to upgrade as the kit is usually just thrown away at the end of 2/3 years or whatever.

Sad story. Our firm has >200 Compaq and Dell PCs that are 'obselete'. No great performance PCs but would make ideal PVRs, Wife/Kids PCs, IPCOP firewalls, you name it. No, because the HDs 'may' contain sensitive data they are crushed as are their 21" CRT monitors (not sure how these contain sensitive other than my old one which you could tell had been showing the WIN2K Ctrl-Alt-Del screen for a lot of its life). No amount of pleading on environmental or just plain old sanity ground has had any sway.
Good luck

Chris

[sub]

Just currious, why 64k blocks?

The large amounts of data recorded by this sort of application lends itself to producing very fragmented disks. 64k blocks minimise this problem.

[capone]

I'll do that for my recordings drive then. have acronis, and it can change the cluste size on the fly, which is very nice (was a pmagic user for years).

sub, just currious then, what do you recommend? Keeping GB on C w/ everything, or having it on the recording drive, or another drive in general?

[sub]

sub, just currious then, what do you recommend? Keeping GB on C w/ everything, or having it on the recording drive, or another drive in general?

I just have one drive in my machines, but sure - there is probably some benefits in having a separate drive for your recordings.

[capone]

I think he was suggesting for he recordings, but I'm not sure...in which case, it would be in 64k blocks (unless there's a 3rd drive in play here). I wasn't sure there would be much of reason to have it on a different drive.

[borgs5]

Building a PC can be fun but can also be a complete nightmare if you're unlucky. I've built 3 and 2 have behaved themselves and one was a complete nightmare, which after a year of swapping out components and 100's of OS reinstalls I gave up on. The problem is, if you get intermittent crashes, it can be very difficult to figure out what is causing them and it can get pretty expensive too unless you have access to lots of spare components.

That said, my Dell isn't totally stable either. It has major objections to Zone Alarm (lots of intermittent blue screens) so I switched to Sygate about a year ago and it hasn't blue-screened since! And, it doesn't come out of standby properly - HD controller switches to PIO mode - this renders standby unusable.

As has been mentioned you also have to be careful with Dell. There was a time when they used non-standard PSU's. I would also make sure that if you decide against a particular Dell option that things aren't left out that make it impossible for you to add your own later on.

[scott]

To clarify my previous statement - I recommended you keep the GBPVR application, and all your other programs, etc. on your c: drive, but configure GBPVR to point to a second physical hard drive for recordings.

From a wear and tear standpoint - the C: drive would then not get thrashed around so much with constand reading and writing that a PVR app puts on a drive.

Also, I think from a performance standpoint, it helps to have the "data drive" focused on just laying down the tracks rather than have to jump around to reference other application and OS files. I know photoshop recommends that you have the "scratch disk" (used as temp memory for large image editing processes) on a seperate physical drive just for this reason.

It's a shame about the company that's so short sited about the recycling of computers... They should be shamed into donating the equipment to inner city schools at the very least. It takes a few extra minutes to scrub harddrives, but the benifit would be worth it. Or - they could pull the harddrives and hammer those if they lack confidence in there ability to truly erase a harddrive.

[nitrogen_widget]

Dell does know how to do quiet.
However upgrading can be a pain because Dell only lists compatible hardware that is available at the time of manufacture.
So if you've got a p3 800mhz cpu & a 1ghz cpu wasn't available at the time you won't find documentation on whether the MB is compatible.

What tuner card comes with this particular Dell?
The site didn't say.

[tdave00]

Thanks for all the replies.

I don't remember what tuner card options they offered. The tuner was not included. I popped my pvr-150 in it a few days after getting it. Had to download the mce 150 drivers from Hauppauge and it has worked fine. I went with 1gb ram ($90), upgraded to 160gb hard drive ($40), and added the mce remote, receiver and channel changer for $20. I really like this machine. Not very expandable though. Only two pci slots and one "new" video card slot (pci express or something like that). Because of that if, scratch that, when I install another tuner card I will have to remove my pci modem card to make room for it. That sucks, but only from the standpoint of the caller-id thing. Maybe I'll get a usb modem for that, but I doubt it.

I never had a fast enough machine to take advantage of gbpvr properly, but this xp mce is awesome. Not as customizable as gbpvr. But it is sweet. And being able to extend it to your televisions with xbox 360 and other extenders is going to be very sweet. I really think that software like gbpvr and xbmc, etc have really pushed the envelope and challenged microsoft to develop some really great software.

[Torque]

I work in IT and support about 400-500 Dell computers. For this type of environment, I really like Dell especially since I can get certified to repair their machines each year and order parts online and replace them myself the next day. I don't think I've called Dell's support line in over a year. But as far as using a Dell for a PVR, I'd rather build one myself. Then I get to decide how quiet it is, what the case looks like, how much performance it has, etc.

I'm pretty happy with the PC in my sig especially considering I put it together from some existing parts (like CPU and RAM) and saved some cash that way because I wasn't sure if this whole PVR thing was gonna be worth it in the end. And it looks like part of my AV equipment.

Now that I'm addicted to it, my wife more so, I got the greenlight to put as much money as needed to keep it running good. I easily added an additional HDD and RAM and when I'm ready to upgrade the CPU, I know I can find a motherboard and CPU that will fit in that case... the upgrade cost will be way less than if I had a Dell. BTW, I think the Athlon64 processors are the cats ass for PVRs especially with the cool-n-quiet feature. I have a A64 3700+ in my main system running nearly at room tempurature and sometimes I have to check the LEDs to see if it's on, it's that quiet. There aren't many Dells I've worked with that are that quiet unless they are completely idle (i.e., doing absolutely NOTHING). We ordered a batch of 3.4Ghz Dell Dimensions that were nice and quiet and then suddenly sounded like a jet taking off when they had any type of CPU load. Unacceptable for a PVR.

BTW, I tried installing and running GB on my D: partition and had MANY quirks. 1) alot of the plugins didn't work correctly. 2) I had random errors when I'd stop a recording or playback. I started over fresh with GB installed on C: and it's been running great ever since (recordings and stuff still point to D.