Thanks for the advice. Regarding what I want to use it for, I guess you
could consider me a power user and should have mentioned this at the
beginning. My current PC is an 8 year old Evesham that has had varous mods
over the years and is overdue for replacement. I guess my original question
was just to get a feel for what brands people are buying at the moment.
Jon.
2008/11/17 Paul Stimpson <paul@???>
> Hi Jon,
>
> I'd go with Dell just about any time. I've found them to be well built,
> consistent and good value. They also buy good, brand name parts and I've
> never had any huge problem with Linux compatibility.
>
> I currently have a Dimension desktop (still going strong in its 4th year)
> and a nearly new Precision M6300 "mobile workstation." (Aka a big butch
> laptop that you wouldn't want to carry around all day but a fantastic
> performer that is great to carry to work use, carry to the next job and so
> on.)
>
> Before my current Dell. Owned an Acer Travelmate. It was solid and (other
> than a dodgy ACPI and DSDT implementation that caused trouble with Ubuntu
> Edgy and that some of the BIOS settings could only be changed with their
> Windows control panel) it was fine. It was from the 4000 series (the mid
> range). One of the guys at work bought a 2000 series (entry level) and it
> wasn't half as good for build quality.
>
> I would strongly advise you against buying a Sony. I just fixed one for
> someone. It was poor inside and made from the kind of cheap parts you'd buy
> at a computer fair. It also had Sony optical drives which are known to be
> particularly vulnerable to copy protection on bought media (no surprise
> considering Sony own music and movie studios.) To top this Sony had used an
> Asus motherboard that was a special variant and all the Windows utilities
> from the Asus website reported "unsupported model" and refused to install. I
> would also avoid "store own brand" kit like Advent from PC World. I've not
> had good experiences of build quality there.
>
> I'd go along with Sean that the most important thing is to decide more or
> less what you want your new PC to do for the next 3 years before you start
> shopping. It's all to easy to end up buying something that doesn't meet your
> needs throughout its lifetime or that is over-specced (and probably
> overpriced) when surrounded by pages of shiny kit, all of which is better
> than what you had. For example, I bought my last laptop with general office
> tasks in mind (there weren't any stunning Linux games back then) but a
> couple of years later I discovered 3D gaming on Linux and it really
> struggled.
>
> Good advice a friend gave me was to look at the price/performance graph and
> get the best performance you can before the price starts rising very fast.
> Like 10% costs £50, another 10% costs £70, the next 10% costs £200. I
> usually find that one step behind the latest and greatest is a good place to
> be.
>
> Good luck. Let us know how you get on.
> Paul.
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry(R) wireless device
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