<p>My computer’s main hard drive died yesterday. It’s a weird setup that my husband put together where the data is on a different drive, so I didn’t actually lose much, but he tells me the backup main drive is 8 years old and I should buy a new computer today.</p>
<p>Okay, my husband is a complete geek and builds computers for himself all the time, but every single time I ask him for help with my computer, he grumbles about it. So does my son the geek. I’m getting tired of being grumbled at, I’m not that incompetent.</p>
<p>I want a computer for these functions:
*photography—lots of photography (Adobe Photoshop)
*email (I use gmail)
*keeping track of finances (Quicken)
*internet functions (blogging, CC, reading the newspaper, google, etc.)
*Microsoft office (word, excel, sometimes other things)</p>
<p>Price is not really an issue. I don’t want a laptop. So the question becomes: Mac vs. PC/Vista? Why? How much RAM, data storage, etc.?</p>
<p>I can’t stand the keyboards on laptops… they make my hands hurt. When I want to hang out at a coffee shop, I’ll borrow one of my husband’s laptops.</p>
<p>I found a Dell Vista system that has a double-drive automatic backup option and 3 GB of RAM… and was a lot cheaper than a Mac, so I bought that.</p>
<p>I am a recent convert to a Mac and love it – it’s especially great for storing and organizing all of my photographs. My mom even replaced her computer with a Mac as well. She’s uses Quicken, though, and it took a good bit of maneuvering for my son to allow the Mac to run Quicken. Apparently the Mac version of Quicken has a lot of problems, so he set it up so Windows could also run on her Mac to allow her to use Quicken – okay, I am clearly not a computer guru (but my son is). My point is that if you use Quicken you should investigate whether you think a Mac will work for your needs.</p>
<p>I almost bought the system you just did. I ordered it but Dell ended up delaying it a couple of times so I ended up canceling the order. I ended up buying a Gateway desktop from Costco - Quad-Core, 3G Ram, 400G 7200 RPM drive, 22" flatscreen Monitor, TV tuner, Vista, etc. It was a pretty good price. I’ve built lots of computers over the years but I doubt I could have built this for less money. It doesn’t have the extra Raid1 drive in it like yours but I may end up just buying an external drive for backup. I bought my Ds some Seagate external 500G drives that are pretty nice and have a 5 year warranty.</p>
<p>Well, I’ll let you know if Dell delays this. It’s not the RAID drive (that’s what I have now)–it’s just a two-drive mirror system which my husband says will work better (a touch more expensive). I already have a 24" monitor (I love it). </p>
<p>I bought my first PC in 1984 and I have to be honest, at this point I feel a little like I’m buying a new refrigerator… I don’t play games so bells and whistles don’t matter as much as reliability. I’ve always just bought the most computer I could get for $2500–you sure get a lot more now than you did in 1984!–but this time I spent about half that and still have more computer than I need. But I really like the idea of the mirror system, I hate recreating files.</p>
<p>The two drives that mirror each other is a ‘Raid’ configuration (Raid 1).</p>
<p>You get a lot more for your money nowadays. My first purchased system was a CP/M Z80 system, before the IBM PC was available, and ran about $3000. For that I had no hard drive at all (just 8" floppies), the monitor was a Televideo terminal, and the ram was about 64K. </p>
<p>The Gateway I just bought was $1199. The problem on the Dell order that was causing the delays was availability of the wireless keyboard/mouse for some reason.</p>
<p>Another recent Mac convert. I have a Mac laptop with 4 Gigs of ram and 100 of hard drive. IPhoto is a fantastic program. I can download photos from any digital camera with no trouble and no drivers, and edit them as needed. I got the Student/Teacher version of Office for Mac and it does everything I need. Also, I paid for something called .Mac (dot Mac), it’s space on Mac’s online hard-drive. You can set files up there that are private, and others that can be seen by other people - great for sharing photos. The basic dot-mac comes with 10 G of space, but you can buy more. It’s about $99/year. Great for backing up your hard-drive. Also, the new Mac operating system, comes with something called Time-Machine, for backing up. I need to learn to use it, it’s supposed to be terrific. </p>
<p>If you have an Apple store near you, make an online appointment with a personal shopper and go check it out.</p>
<p>I have been building computers for over a decade (I work in IT) I wouldn’t recommend a mac. If you are happy with windows and know the operating system well then you will be fine.</p>
<p>As far as the vista haters go, I would recommend you download the RC (release candidate) of service pack 1 (ask husband to help you.) Ask your husband if you are having trouble. The system you got is a great system and should last you quite a long time. To get the most out of the system make sure to set windows update to down and install updates automatically. </p>
<p>Prices have dropped significantly and I am sure you will be happy with the machine for quite some time. Windows Vista is a bit tricky at first, although far more secure & safe than previous versions. You may find it a bit slower, but ultimately it comes down to a safety&security vs performance, and I am glad Microsoft went with Safety. </p>
<p>It is coming to point where you get less bang for the buck when buying components and building the machine separately which is a travesty IMO since IT has always been one of my hobbies. I am a Linux user, I boot into windows vista ultimate to do my engineering work, I have a Pentium 4HT processor in my main desktop which is still running much better than I had expected it to with vista ultimate. I think you made a great choice. It would of been preferred to back-up to an external hard drive, but that can be deemed negligible in your case since it doesn’t seem as though you have super important files that need to be backed up. (I could be wrong)</p>
<p>Good choice. Please report back when you receive it to let us know how you like it :-)</p>
<p>UC-etc-Dad: my husband the nerd explained to me some sort of subtle difference between what I bought and a RAID configuration but I expect it doesn’t really matter. My present computer (the one that is half-dead) has the OS and programs on one drive and then the RAID drives (in this case there are four) store data only; the new one will have the OS/programs/data on both drives so that each drive will be a complete backup of the other, which seems to me to be a better idea for the way I do things. </p>
<p>I would be happy with either a Mac or Vista–I go back and forth and know both OSs–but I’m too cheap to pay half again as much for a Mac and still not get the mirror drives. My husband is a serious amateur photographer so I have about 250 GB of photographs (from ten years of digital photography) that have to be stored on my computer (we keep copies on all the computers except the laptops).</p>
<p>(Because we run an internet business, we have Macs and PCs in the house so we can test that the website is working properly on all the different browsers.)</p>
<p>As for Quicken, I’ve used Quicken to store the family finances since 1991, when I ran it on my Mac IIci… which was the actual machine used to develop the MIDI interface (not the same kind of machine… I bought it used from the guy who’d developed the interface). Yes, it’s a great program, but it does store its data in the same place as the program, not in My Documents (on the PC), so be careful to make external backups (lots of people only backup My Documents). Yes, I have a CD-ROM backup.</p>
<p>What you got is not RAID. It is simply running as master/slave, backing up on the slave drive in case the primary fails. In simple terms, a RAID will run both drives simultaneously to increase speeds. </p>
<p>I am pretty much running the same type of setup, using different PC’s running different configs on many operating systems, to be certain no issues arise and that I can trouble shoot them without any downtime on any of my systems, as well as to be able to connect remotely to multiple clients at once without having to run multiple remote desktops on the same machine (slows things down tremendously)</p>
<p>mathmom, Vista is fine with me and my husband says it’s much more reliable than XP which was the other choice. But I’m curious what you’re running if not XP? </p>
<p>UriA, thanks for the clarification. Master/slave works for me and explains it better than I was doing.</p>
Not to belabor the point but what dmd77 has is Raid 1. Raid 1 is simply mirroring a drive to another. Even Dell’s website refers to her ‘Dell Datasafe’ drives on the Inspiron desktops as ‘Raid 1’. This is a relatively inexpensive solution for protection against a hard drive crash. There are other Raid levels that involve more than two drives (Raid 5, etc.) but that’s typically used by higher-end servers.</p>
<p>what system is this? Dell’s “datasafe” is their online backup solution? I am not aware of Dell’s newer models. They may be using RAID 1 or they may be simply have set the backup system (assuming windows system restore) to image the disk onto that drive (similar to Apple’s time machine.)??</p>
<p>It’s Raid 1 - mirroring the drive. The ‘Dell Datasafe’ is a combo of things (including online backup) but part of it can include the redundant drive configured as Raid 1. </p>
<p>I run XP - Mathson got XP for his laptop last summer, but he mostly runs Linux and just uses XP when he has to. Current computers don’t have enough memory for Vista, though I’m thinking it may be time to replace the desktop.</p>
Photos and Adobe (I have an ancient version) are space hogs, get as much RAM as you can afford.</p>