Members LiveMusic Posted August 1, 2005 Members Share Posted August 1, 2005 A friend wants to get into computing. Place online orders with her company. Send email. Basic stuff, nothing fancy. Dell has... Dimension 3000About $500Pentium P4 2.8 GhZ256MB RAM40GB HDCDRWWinXPPrinter17" monitorNo floppy Any recommendations for something lower cost than that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members valkyriesound Posted August 1, 2005 Members Share Posted August 1, 2005 Go to www.fatwallet.com Read their "Hot Deals" forum There are much better deals like that every month if you just check there for coupon codes. I just saw the same computer with a 19" digital flat panel for about the same price. Valky Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dylan Walters Posted August 1, 2005 Members Share Posted August 1, 2005 Dell has a deal on a Celeron system with a CRT monitor for $300, FWIW. It only has a 90-day warranty at that price, but you can always upgrade it to something longer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted August 1, 2005 Moderators Share Posted August 1, 2005 If she can, double the RAM. I got my wife a Dell laptop with 256 and it was a pain. Once I got the other stick for 512 it was fine. XP is VERY slow with 256. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LiveMusic Posted August 1, 2005 Author Members Share Posted August 1, 2005 Originally posted by Lee Knight If she can, double the RAM. I got my wife a Dell laptop with 256 and it was a pain. Once I got the other stick for 512 it was fine. XP is VERY slow with 256. Lee, I am running XP Pro on a Dell Inspirion 7500 with 256MB RAM and speed is fine. I dunno if the difference is PRo versus Home version. What do you think? You may have too much garbage in your startup? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted August 1, 2005 Members Share Posted August 1, 2005 Originally posted by Lee Knight If she can, double the RAM. I got my wife a Dell laptop with 256 and it was a pain. Once I got the other stick for 512 it was fine. XP is VERY slow with 256. Lee's on the nose. Dell ought to do the right thing and not sell those things with 256 MB. Yeah, you can run Windows XP in 256, if you trim it down. I actually seldom get above that when I'm not using BFD -- but I'm pretty aggressive about keeping my laptop lean and mean. But if my laptop had had all the crapware installed on it (that it did) and had only had 256 MB... I doubt the crapware would have had room to turn around sideways, let alone apps... [Remember the Compaq machines from 4 or 5 years ago that you could boot up but that would crash within an hour or two just sitting there, because of all the garbage software loaded on them? They just sat there bleeding memory until they locked up with a blue screen.] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted August 1, 2005 Moderators Share Posted August 1, 2005 I disabled just about every startup app on my wife's laptop with 256. She would moan and groan about how long everything took. She only does the odd net surfing... that's it. 512 and everything's swell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dylan Walters Posted August 1, 2005 Members Share Posted August 1, 2005 Funny. I've used XP Pro with MS Office Pro on systems with only 256 and it's fine. Still, 512 is the preffered amount to run with XP, 1GB minumum for DAW's. Dell used to ship budget XP systems with only 128 MB. Now *that* is painful! If you do want more RAM then you're better off not getting it from Dell. They'll charge twice as much as you could find elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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