......A new black Dell

[Speedball]

Our 6 year old gateway 550 was on it's last leg so we took the help from a twentyish' year old neighbor of my brothers who works with computers for a living and used his discount to help us out.

$500.00 bucks later we have a 17" LCD monitor and a Dimension 3100 Dell computer. It has pentium 4 and 80 gig? hard drive and 512 somethings of RAM and XP Professional. The new keyboard is quite compact and has a soft feel to the keys compared to our old Microsoft board. The 17" monitor will go with my wife to upgrade her 15" CRT at her place of employment because we have a nice 21" LCD that is now being used at home. The tower is almost stone silent and the Klipsch forum runs much, much quicker and for the last couple years we have had basic Comcast Cable.

I'm sure it does not compare to some of the super duper fast high end rig's I read about with some of the guy's here but this baby is much nicer than the old "noisemaker". Our old Gateway cost about $2800.00 and I was somewhat suprised at how cheap they are now day's.

.......now I wish those Klipsch Ultra 2.0 computer speakers would arrive we ordered from Klipsch/eBay refurbished the other day for next to nothing.

[Jay481985]

Glad to hear everything is going well. Lately pc computer makes have

been making systems that are cheaper then diy computer making because

of late everyone has a computer and the outrageous pricing is just not

capable anymore... They are great for the money, of late laptops are

the money makers for pc computer as they have higher profit margins.

[Speedball]

I feel for $500.00 we stole the darn thing and it does everything.

Heck, the $60.00 dollars for the Klipsch refurbished Ultra 2.0' s seem like a steal from eBay.

Everbody posting pictures is quite enjoyable now.

[Gospel]

Speedball,

Was your Gateway the dual CPU E-550? I had a dual CPU Gateway E-350. It was a sweet machine until its motherboard developed a weird problem. It would not execute programs in extended memory. It would crash on bootup of both Windows and Linux. But DOS programs ran just fine. Memory, processor, and hard drive diagnostics found no errors. I never solved the problem. Since then, I've been building my own PCs.

It is cheaper to buy a pre-built computer but it is more fun building you own.

Enjoy life!

Steven

[Speedball]

I don't think it was a dual anything, just pretty old and very slow that showed me a blue screen and crashed regularly. The first few years it was great and never had any problems. The last year or so it was just noisy to operate.......probably worn out.

Does everybody leave their computer on 24/7? With this new one I put it to sleep in "standby" mode. Hope this is the way to make it last a long time.

[CAS]

Current computer has only been shut off a couple times in 3+ years (vacations; forced myself to not remote access).

Fan may become a little noisy if not dusted occasionally. A shot of air from the inside out and a drop of non-metallic lube and good as new. It bugs me a little when I see computers that have never, ever been dusted. It's like they've been stuffed with polyfill to dampen the enclosure.

[MD1032]

I would personally recommend upgrading your RAM to one gig. It's a relatively inexpensive upgrade, and it would vastly improve your computer's speed in some situations.