HP Pavilion Media Center m8330f PC http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/pr.../ds_m8330f.pdf

We want to stay with HP and this pc seems to have gotten mostly very good reviews.

I can get it for $694 shipped.

 

What's your application: Games, Server, PVR, Solitaire, Accounting, Publishing etc?

 

mainly pics, small business apps, and HD home movies

 

And whats wrong with using the old pc? Even P2s are suited for those chores.

 

laptops........i just got a compaq presairo... 15.4, my last one i have used for almost 3 years and it was also a compaq 15.4, use them for my sports announcing ( music, sound bytes, organ music, clap chants, etc.) also for the car shows where i dj for...... just hard getting used to the vista over the xp.... for the office stuff i use it for......... i always buy an extended warranty on them due to the fact i use the heck out of the units.... 70 plus baseball games, 15 plus volleyball games 28 plus basketball games, 6 plus car shows, 3 5k runs,........all this in a year, plus the overheads that i produce for church, and any of my electrical estimating........

at home have an hp pc....... w 19 inch wide screen.......

 

old pc shot craps about a month ago

we recently got a HP pavillion. We really like it, but we need a pc too.

 

Yeap have a HP desktop..........
2- Compaq laptops...... 1 about 3 years old
1 just bought a month ago.

son has HP laptop. and desktop HP.... love them both

 

Me, I have three in the house that I built myself. One continues with XP, one with Vista Home Premium and one with Vista Ultimate. Of course it does cost a little more to do your own, but, if it craps out, who are you to blame? I've been modding and upgrading my computers since '98 or '99 and getting most of the parts from computer shows and ebay. Then, with the left-overs, I build and sell. I probably sold about 15 computers this way. Only had one of those die and took care of it at no charge. But that is just me. I've been selling these at @ 50-70% lose to me for what I spent. I have no professional computer training, learned by trial and error. To each his own. Just my 2-cents. The last store bought computer that I bought was a Packard Bell SX2 50 way back in '94. That one cost me more than any of my home builds @ $1,800.

 

So no opinion on this pc.

 

I just don't look at store PC's. Most of them come with bare minimum necessities. For Vista you need a minimum of 2GB of DDR2 PC6400 RAM for average to good performance. I use 4GB in my Vista PC's. For Video RAM, most store bought share system RAM and use on average 256MB. I use 1 Gb of video RAM using 2-512MB vid cards using SLI mode (Nvidia cards). Next, for sound, your store bought use the m/b for that and again share system RAM. Do you copy DVD's? It is a lot faster to have a copier and a player to copy on-the-fly. That means two dvd combo drives. Then there is hdd capacity, flash card reader/writers. How big of a widescreen lcd monitor do you want? If you want to look at price, you will be sacrificing performance. But, if you just want to do homework and e-mail and such, go cheap. Again, this is just my 2-cents. I am not knocking any manufacturer, but you get what you pay for. Look around and then decide.