Just ordered a new DELL.. Tell me what ya think..

[Chip]

What's up guy's !
I don't think i did to bad considering i spent about $3200.00 a little over 4 years ago on my current DELL PII 450 setup!, lol..

Let me just say that i mostly, just surf the net, use outlook express for email.. About the hardest working application i use is Image Expert Premium edition to D/L,store,manipulate&send images from my computer. I use a Canon G3 digital camera (nice digicam)..
Maybe now i might pick up a couple games.

Scratch the junk Harman Kardon speakers that come with this order. I bought the Logitech Z680 5.1 speaker system in the peripherals section on DELL's site:

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?page=products/details&CRID=2&CONTENTID=5048&countryid=19&languageid=1

5.1 DD/DTS processor 550watts total - $254.00 shipped
PLII, 5 channel stereo, DVD-A
BASH amp
Remote control




Order detail - order placed 4/19/2003 1:45:52PM



Pentium® 4 Processor at 2.80GHz w/533MHz front side bus/ 512K L2 Cache Qty:

1 Unit Price: $1,494.00 shipped

Floppy Drive and Additional Storage Devices 3.5 in Floppy Drive
Mouse Dell® 2-button scroll mouse
CD or DVD Burner for 2nd bay FREE UPGRADE! New 48x/24x/48x Max CD-RW Drive
Sound Card Sound Blaster Audigy 2™ sound card with DVD Audio
Security Software Norton Antivirus® 2003 12-month subscription upgrade
Limited Warranty, Services and Support Options 1 Year Limited Warranty plus 1 Year At-Home Service
Software Bundles Microsoft® Works Suite 2003 with Money 2003
Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
Memory SAVE $60! (Savings included in price) 512MB DDR SDRAM at 333MHz
Monitors 19 in (18.0 in viewable) M992 Monitor
Keyboard Dell® Enhanced Multimedia Keyboard
Special Offer $50 Special Offer
Digital Music Dell Jukebox powered by MUSICMATCH
Speakers New Harman Kardon® HK-206 Speakers
Hard Drive 30GB Ultra ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive
Network Interface Integrated Intel® PRO 10/100 Ethernet
CD or DVD Drive 16 Max DVD-ROM Drive
Digital Photography Dell Picture Studio, Image Expert Standard
Modem 56K PCI Telephony Modem
Video Cards New 128mb DDR ATI Radeon™ 9700 TX Graphics Card with TV-Out and DVI

I also ordered a Canon i950 photo printer from buy.com for $222.00 shipped w/two packs Canon Glossy Photo paper pro (8.5x11). This printer will do borderless 8.5x11 prints..

http://www.usa.canon.com/html/conCprProductDetail.jsp?modelid=8719&item=8757&section=10214

Printer & Photo Paper Pro arrived yesterday.. Seems to be the hottest photo printer out right now..

I'll be moving my Microsoft Intellipoint Explorer optical mouse to this new puter too..
I run a cable modem.


One thing i wish i had gotten a bigger hard drive... I don't know if i'd even need it but, when the machine gets here Monday, i'm upgradeing to a 120 gig betty. I'll partition the sucker. This way all the junk software DELL loads won't be there. I'd've gone right into the control panel and cleaned house anyway, lol..




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[Bing Fung]

Looks to be a good deal Chip, your going to enjoy it for sure coming from a 450Mhz system :T

You could probably get a 120 GB western Digital drive for cheaper than what Dell would have charged you for the upgrade.

Have Fun!




Bing

[Andrew Pratt]

Most impressive:T

[Trevor Schell]

That should be a great system!!:T




Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

[Chip]

Thanks guys. I think it might cost me like another 80 bucks to get a 120 gig Western Digital HD. I saw one in the periphrials section for about $140.00... so, we'll see.. I wonder if i could just keep the 30 gig drive and add another hard drive ?
I have an XP Professional upgrade disc.. I'm running XP Pro on this PII 450 now with 256 megs a ram. I'll probably load that on my new P4.
Hey you guys want to check out a cool XP tweaks site ? Check this out-
Tweakxp.com - http://www.tweakxp.com/

I've been chang'n stuff in my registry for the last two days and it still runs !!! hahahahaha...




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[Gordon Moore]

You can always add another harddrive provided you got room. 2 IDE peripherals per channel so up to 4 hard drives or 2 harddrives and a cd-rom and a burner...you get the idea. For the onboard IDE.

A-roo-ga that's a nice system.

I have the baby brother in speakers...the z640 and think it's just fine for a computer speaker system...bass is a little muddy but otherwise does much better than the creative competitor at a better price point...I hear that the 680 is da-bomb!


Anyways....nice system. :T

[Chip]

Just got everthing hooked up. Man! They load alotta junk. Holy molly.. It's fast though. Know what kinda erked me? Supposed to be a 30 gig HD ? It's only 27.8 ??? !!! Unreal... Lol..




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[Gordon Moore]

Depends where you are reading that value from.

Don't forget hard drive manufacturers will talk about 1 Meg = 1000000 bytes.
But bits and bytes are really in a base 2 numbering system. 8 bits = 1 byte and so 1 Meg is really 1024X1024 (2^10 * 2^10)= 1048576 bytes.

but that aint' the whole picture because you have to factor in cluster size and sectors

A file must be stored in a whole disk cluster... and no cluster can be used by more than one file. The space left over is what your defrag program refers to as slack space.

Cluster size determines how many sectors (the smallest unit on a hard drive) can be stored and each sector can store 512 bytes.

a 4k cluster will typically hold 8 sectors. (everything is base 2)

So if you take another look at your bios and determine how many sectors you have:

take 2^(# of sectors) * 512 bytes = hard drive size in bytes

then take that and divide by both 1000^3 and 1024^3 and see what you get get for GB and then it should be apparent why their are 2 different sizes reported. Both are sorta right...It would be too confusing for most people to buy a 28.7 GB hard drive.

You can't even blame this on the metric system Although the numbering follows the metric systems more intuitive prefixing: Kilo = 1000, Mega = Million and so on.

Cheers

[Chip]

I'm swapping the HD out for a 60 gig drive for free. Thanks nice DELL chick! They are also crediting me back for the Harman Kardon speakers and i get to keep them since i have the Logitech z680 package coming.. The girl said they would just trash them anyway..




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT

[Bing Fung]

Nicely explained Gord

Good deal Chip... So dode that mean you'll just have the one drive?




Bing

[Chip]

Actually, i'm going to run two HD's now. DELL is sending me the 60 gig drive and i went to Western Digital's site and bought a 120 gig Special Edition Caviar drive w/8 meg cache to use as my primary drive




Chip Engle


"Concrete ain't a spectator sport"


<a href="http://www.htguide.com/bilder/index.cfm?fuseaction=arkivbilder&userid=0&selected userid=336" target="_blank">My HT