Horribly OT - PC Advice

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have to say, thats no bad option either.

[Andy Hall]

I have to deal with the same issue, and on balance, for the application, XP Professional was reluctantly my choice, although I suppose one could use the home version. Five suggestions:

- Keep the basic installation simple and with as few applications as possible.

- Use the user accounts to segregate what they do and also set those up without any admin privileges.

- Set up remote access (e.g. remote desktop or VNC)

- Install a good quality commercial virus scanner and personal firewall. I've found the Norton one to be good and reliable as well as lockable.

- Implement a proper imaging and backup setup so that once the machine is built, you have a disaster recovery DVD which can be reloaded quickly, plus incremental backups of what they do. It is surprising how much valuable work ends up going onto the machine. An external hard drive would be another way to do this. Some come with a DR arrangement.

That does maintain a setup that remains pretty stable and reasonable for a period of weeks. It does get rebooted every few days because it's shut down. It certainly won't run for months on end without attention of some kind such as applying the myriad of security and other updates that Microsoft issues to cover its incompetences or generally tidying it up. Mostly this can be accomplished by remote access, so overall the availability is pretty good.

I think that that's a workable approach, but now that the wrinklies have become more computer literate, it will probably be switched to Linux. I've been using Unix systems for more than 25 years, so it's not that hard for me anyway, but to be honest, the distributions such as SuSE are now extremely well packaged to the point that for setting up a machine for this purpose it's an out of the box solution - i.e. run the DVD and load. When all is installed, it will run reliably for months or years on end, deals with network connections properly and is easily manageable remotely.

The main points are ease of use and especially reliability. Windows, even XP is not robust. It still isn't an operating system in the proper sense. It tolerates having lots of applications installed very poorly and suffers from a creeping entropy of deterioration just in normal use. Applications behave badly and leave temporary files and crud around. In a mobile situation of being away from home with a notebook, it simply can't be relied upon to remain solid. If I loaded on a small set of applications it would just about be OK. However, I need to have a lot of things installed and available and it simply isn't up to it - even a powerful machine with 3GHz processor and 1GB memory.

I also run Linux on my notebook and it is very effective and functional. However, there are certain professional and commercially supported applications that I need to run to exchange information with others and these are not available under Linux.

The Mac provides me with a very stable underlying operating system (Unix) which will run for weeks in and out of standby without deterioration. I don't need to be able to dig into the operating system to use it, but I can if I want to. I can get all of the commercially supported applications that I need. Its use is well thought out. Those things are worth the extra cost to me.

I have found their desktop machines (have bought several over the years) are quite reasonable and well made. The notebooks are utter garbage - never again on those.

They do attend for service quite well, but keep in mind that they will not restore data, so a disaster recovery setup is important.

[Douglas de Lacey]

And a sixth: get a (free) ubuntu Linux CD set ( if you can't download it and burn your own) and let them run linux straight from the CD. Without tweaking they

*cannot* write to the HD so they can make as many mistakes as they wish without affecting your Win install. They'll find the user interface hardly any different from XP anyway and it will almost certainly give them all the functionality they need.

(Apols if this has already been mentioned: I haven't been following all the thread.)

Douglas de Lacey

[jaycee]

I am on my 3rd Dell, they have served me very well. In the past I have had to use their support teams and found them to be very helpful. Like most users I like an easy access to the box which Dell provides and the layout is straightforward. I have always used the 'special offer' route to purchase, thus avoiding the delivery charge which is high. Cheers, Jaycee.

[John Cartmell]

If that's serial rather than parallel it's self-contradictory! ;-)

[Grunff]

Not at all - hardware moves on. Sure, if all you want to do is a little bit of word processing, spreadsheets, email and web you could happily still be using a 15 year old machine. But there's a whole bunch of other activities which require that you keep up with hardware fairly closely.

For me, the main one is gaming.

We build all our machines, because that way we end up with exactly the spec we want. This usually works out more expensive than buying them, but for us it's worth it. Even so, each machine will only have a lifetime of 2-3 years. At that point, it needs to be completely rebuilt (new mobo, cpu, ram, drives, graphics). A nicer alternative is to retire the old machine and build a new one.

During their life, they serve us very well.

[John Cartmell]

[about computers that should be built to last 5-10 years but which reside within a system that forces users to replace machines much more frequently to the detriment of users' pockets and the environment]

In that case there is something badly wrong with the system.

[Grunff]

Only in that hardware performance continues to increase in accordance with Moore's law. If hardware constantly gets faster, software (in particular entertainment software) will be written to make use of the faster hardware. And as long as the software is appealing, users will choose to buy it and buy hardware to run it.

So there's the flaw in the system - the continuous improvement of hardware. What do you suggest we do about it?

From an individual user's POV, it's easy - stick with your old machine, and choose not to run any demanding software.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well, for most people that is really all they DO want actually.

[Mark]

Some Dell Offers can only be accessed by typing in the promotional code into the web site or using the old fashioned telephone.

Mark

[Grunff]

That is true for many, yes - but it doesn't apply to everyone.

[Mark]

I always use crucial mainly for the warranty. They are about the only company that don't quibble about returns in my experience.

I wouldn't buy memory from computer fairs.

Mark

[Douglas de Lacey]

And the first corollary of Moore's Law is that software authors get more and more lazy as a result and write less and less efficient code. Anyone remember the Sinclair Z88? It had an operating system and Pipedream (combined text processor, spreadsheet, database and comms package) in

12K (yes, that's a K not an M).

Douglas de Lacey

[Grunff]

Yes, no arguments there. But there are other reasons for wanting faster machines than just running crappily written office software.

I like RTS games. The current crop of RTS games, which are hugely superior to those from 5 years (never mind 15 years) ago, need fast machines to run. Not just to run well, but to run at all. This is mainly due to the superb graphics, but also to the complexity of the worlds currently used.

[Stuart Noble]

Interested to know what people think about recovery disks. I recently sorted out a friend's Dixons PC, which was infected with all manner of nasties. Put My Documents on to a cdrw, booted from the Dixons recovery CD and the whole thing was running sweetly within the hour. Doing that periodically seems like a simple maintenance schedule for any level of user. So, how easy would it be to create a bootable CD for a home made machine? I rather fancy a bit of colonic irrigation

[John Cartmell]

Avoid Microsoft. Their OSs are designed to make you have to upgrade at too-short intervals. I'm using a 10+ year old computer. It has had a new processor, new hard drives, more memory and OS upgrades. I've added the means to allow networking, USB, &c. But in that time you'll have purchased 4-6 new Windows machines at far greater expense. I'm limited by speed (though it went far faster than the equivalent Windows machines when new and when it had a new processor added) and by colours/resolution (32 thousand colours is its maximum at a reasonable resolution). But it still runs all the software of the last 10 years. Of course I now have an upgrade - but that also runs all the old software even if some has to be done through a form of emulation - and the two will happily run in parallel. I have no expectation of the old machine being pensioned off for another 3-5 years (or more). That may be exceptional; but your expectation of PCs is exceptionally bad.

But suppose you buy a machine and then, a few years later, have the option to add a new card that increases the speed of processing by 5-10 times? ;-)

[PeTe33]

We are.

The shop P.C. is a PII 233 running W2K Pro. Does everything. Though the 4MB graphics card isn't the fastest on the planet. It still manages to run Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Quickbooks etc etc.

IMO PC's are retired far too early.

For gaming get an Xbox 360 for the same price as a top end PC Graphics card.

:¬)

[Grunff]

You're missing the point entirely. I'm not a Windows fan, but I *have* to use Windows, at least some of the time. When I can get away with using other OSes, I do. I'll explain.

At work: All of the web work I do *must* be tested on multiple browsers on Windows. This is despite the fact that it works happily cross-platform. You simply can't guarantee that stuff will look/work as intended without this testing.

But - our servers run Linux and FreeBSD. These OSes are great for servers, and do an excellent job.

At home: All of the games that I like playing will only run under Windows, and *require* fast hardware. That's not the fault of the OS, it's the way the games work (heavy graphics, huge numbers of game components).

[Grunff]

Not my kind of gaming :-(

[TS]

Very foolish as their special offers probably make them the cheapest (by far) in the UK. There are special offers pretty much every day. Look at hotukdeals.com and you will get the codes.

I buy a lot of PCs of all specifications and dont even look elsewhere now. I have never once paid a Dell delivery charge as the special offers always include free delivery.